Medical Reporting:

Where the Story Lies

Gina Kolata

Third
Alfred and Julia
Hill Lecture
on Science, Society,
and the Mass
Media

March 1, 1993

School of Journalism
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
 the Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series
on science, society, and the mass media was established
in 1989 by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger,
and Mary Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of
their parents.

Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak

Ridger in 1949, seven years after the government estab­
lished Oak Ridge to house workers on the atomic bomb
project. The OakRidgerwas the first successful privately
owned newspaper in the city and marked an important
stage in the transition of Oak Ridge from federal opera­
tion to private ownership and self-government.

.t. .

Gina Kolata reports on

science and medicine for
The New York Times. Be­
fore joining the Times in
1987, she was a senior
writer for Science magazine.
Her articles have also appeared in Smithsonian,
American Health, Discover, Ladies Home Jour­
nal, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Ms., GQ,
Psychology Today, and other magazines,
School of Journalism
Ms, Kolata’s books include The Baby Doc­
College of Communications
University of Tennessee
tors: Probing the Limits ofFetal Medicine (1990);
Knoxville The High Blood Pressure Book: A Guide for
Patients and Their Families, written with Dr,
Serial editor: Mark Littmann, Professor Edward Freis (1979): and Combatting the Num­
Cheur of Excellence ber One Killer: The Science Report on Heart
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing Disease, written with Jean Marx (1978),
For her work, Ms. Kolata has received two
Serial design Robert Heller, Associate Professor Howard W. Blakeslee Awards from the Ameri­
consultant: can Heart Association, two William Hcirvey
Awards from the Squibb Company, and awards
Serial designer: Sharon Rasmussen, Graduate Assistant
from the American Dental Association, the New
“Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies”
York Public Health Association, and the Ameri­
© 1993 Gina Kolata can Medical Writers Association,
Publication Authorization Number Ms, Kolata lives in Princeton, New Jersey
ROl-2910-57-001-94 with her husband and two children.
 Medical Reporting:
Where the Story Lies

Gina Kolata
ft;
i
I:

Third
Alfred and Julia
Hill Lecture
on Science, Society,
and the Mass
Media
—

March 1, 1993

School of Journalism
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
@ Last week, as you all know, we
had a tragedy in New York. A bomb
exploded under the World Trade Cen­
ter, killing six people and injuring
more than a thousand. The New York
Times was and still is stuffed with
stories about this disaster. We reported
on the damage to the building and the
search for remnants of a bomb. We
reported on the dead—^who they were
and what their last hours were like.
We wrote about the hundreds of busi­
nesses that were displaced by the clos­
ing of the World Trade Center. We
wrote about the devastating effects on
the commodities exchange,which was
closed following the explosion. We
wrote about terrorism and speculated
about who might have put a bomb in
the parking garage of the World Trade
Center, and why.
The bomb and its aftermath also pro­
vided journalists, at the Times and elsewhere,
an opportunity to rally toward a common
cause. This is what newspapers are known
for and what they can do so well—give the
public the news, in unending detail. With
maps and charts. With the human interest
stories and photographs that make the trag--
edy come alive.
I read the stories as avidly and with as
 much horror as anyone else. My 11-year-old
son was so fascinated and appalled that he is
saving the newspapers on the bombing for his
collection ofwhat he thinks are historic events
captured in the pages of The New York Times.
But although we all think of stories like
the bomb under the World Trade Center as
the essence of journalism, Fd like to give you
a different side of newspaper writing. It
is the stoiy of stories that are not so
obvious and whose direction reflects
more the perceptions and interests of
these are the reporter than the actual events of
the day. These are stories with more of
stories with a murky message. Since 1 write for the
more of a murky Science section, and 1 really love sci­
ence writing, the ones 1 think of are
message.... stories that question the conventional
stories that wisdom of some accepted medical ad­
vice. And they make me ask whether
question the medical experts are correct when they
conventional say, as they so often do, that it is better
to just give a simple health message
wisdom of than to expound at length on the un­
some accepted certainties and doubts behind some
medical advice.
medical Although stories like the ones 1
advice. am going to describe are far from
straightforward, 1 think they can make
perhaps the biggest impact in the long
run. Their aim is to make readers re­
think their assumptions or to understand
nuances in events or messages that are usu­
ally presented as black-or-white, open-and-
shut cases.
Today, 1 thought Fd tell you about sev­
eral stories of this type that 1 wrote, not
because 1 think my stories are necessarily the
best or the most thoughtful, but because 1 am
so intimately acquainted with them and be­
cause 1 can tell you how 1 found them and why
I wrote them. I’ll include one that specifically
involves children and adolescents because,
after all, the symposium’s theme is Kids,
Health, and the Mass Media.
Where Stories Come From_______
I’ll start by telling you a little about how
stories at the Times come about, at least in the
Science section, where 1 work. There are a
dozen of us who regularly write about science
and medicine, and we have a lot of autonomy.
We suggest most of our own stories and
follow our own interests. There are some
stories that are pretty obvious. We always
look at the New England Journal ofMedicine.
We get an advance copy, and we see what’s
coming out that week. We get advance blurbs
from Science and Nature and from the Annals
of Internal Medicine and Lancet that tell us
what’s going to be interesting that week. So
we know a lot about news stories in medicine
that are about to appear.
Although some stories obviously have to
be covered—a major article in a leading medi­
cal journal or an important new federal initia­
tive, for example—we suggest most of our
stories ourselves. Many of the stories we
suggest emerge because we became inter­
ested in the topic and, as we delved into it, we
found it had a lot more to it than we originally
thought. Often this is how we end up with
stories other papers may not have and that,
we hope, may be a little more thought provok­
ing than those stories that say “A discovery
was made; more research is needed,” which is
what a lot of our stories say.
Some of the ways 1 find story ideas are
obvious. 1 read my mail, listen to my phone
messages, read the advemce copies of medical
journals that we receive at the Times, and just
generally keep my eyes open for news. Other
ways require a little more initiative. 1 listen
 carefully when I interview people, because
often they hint at or directly tell me about
stories that are entirely different from what I
expected. And 1 ask myself questions
which, sometimes, have led to surpris­
ing answers.
If you don’t 1 wrote a story several years ago
about drug dealers in New York and
just accept how much money they really make. I
thought about this because I asked
everything you myself: If drug dealers are making so
hear and see, much money, why are they living in
abandoned buildings? So how much
you sometimes money do they really make selling crack
can come up with and who makes the money and what
happens to all those people standing
stories that are on the street comers?
more provocative This thought process happens in
medicine too. You ask yourself ques­
than anything tions that sound sort of stupid and
you would have simpleminded. If you don’t just accept
everything you hear and see, you some­
found reading times can come up with stories that
your mail. are more provocative than anything
you would have found reading your
mail.
Mammoaraphu
I wrote a story last week that was a little
bit unusual. It was a stoiy about mam­
mograms, which was on page 1 last Thurs­
day. The news was that scientists have been
unable to prove that these screening tests
benefit women in their 40s. Yet for a decade,
women in their 40s had been told that regular
mammograms would save their lives.
I became interested in the mammogram
question a few months ago. I had never really
thought about it before. I hadn’t asked myself
any simpleminded questions. When we kept
hearing messages saying that all women
should have mammograms every one to two
years starting at age 40 and every year after
age 50,1 assumed that there were sound facts
behind that. Obviously we wouldn’t have the
American Cancer Society and the National
Cancer Institute urging us to have these
mammograms if we didn’t have proof that
they were going to save the lives of women
starting at age 40.
Then last fall I found out—everybody
who was following medicine found out—about
a report by Canadian researchers. This na­
tional study was supposed to prove once and
for all that mammograms actually save the
lives of women in their 40s. Many studies,
starting with one in the 1960s, have shown
that women over age 50 have a lower death
rate from breast cancer if they have regular
mammograms, presumably because mam­
mograms catch tumors early, when they are
more easily cured.
I hadn’t realized until the Canadian
report got so much publicity that, although
mammograms have been around for about 30
years, there has never been any proof
that they help women in their 40s. The
proof was inferential. Everybody said,
“Well, we have proof mcunmograms
help women in their 50s. If you have a
There has
mammogram, your death rate by breast
cancer is reduced by as much as 25
never been any
percent.” And study after study kept proof that they
showing that for women in their 50s a
mammogram can save their lives, pre­
help women in
sumably because it finds cancers early. their 40s.
So when you remove tumors early, you
have a better prognosis and are less
likely to die from breast cancer. Be­
cause breast cancer incidence seems to go up
when women are in their 40s and you have a
screening test that helps find cancers when
they are very small, you might infer that they
 would help women in their 40s as well.
When studies kept finding no improved
longevity for women in their 40s who had
gotten mammograms, one excuse was that
too few women in their 40s were included in
the studies. Eighty percent of all breast
m cancer is found in women over age 50.
Since women in their 40s have less
breast cancer, you would need many
more women of that age in a study to
everybody’s see an effect.
So the Canadians designed a
dismay, the study study of 50,000 women that, they and
found no effect on others hoped, would finally show what
everyone assumed was true: that regu­
mortality rates in lar mammograms benefit younger
women under 50. women as much as older women.
Women in the study over age 50 once
... This project again had about a 25 percent decrease
was designed to in their death rates when they had
regular mammograms. But, to
be the perfect everybody’s dismay, the study found
study, but when no effect on mortality rates in women
under 50.
it didn’t provide Now this finding caused a lot of
the expected consternation. Some radiologists cas­
tigated the study. This project was
outcome, it was designed to be the perfect study, but
bad science. when it didn’t provide the expected
outcome, it was bad science. The crit­
ics said, “Well, at the beginning of the
study, the X-ray machines used were
not up to today’s standards and the
mammograms were no good.” The Canadian
directors argued yes, they were. They were
state-of-the-art at the time and doctors had
been recommending them for quite some time
and now doctors were going back and saying
they weren’t good enough.
The critics said that the study did not
include enough women in their 40s, or that
perhaps the study had women wait too long
between mammograms, or that the research­
ers didn’t follow the women long enough for
em effect to be evident. And that might be an
answer.
It is not clear what to do with all this
data. Did it show anything or not and should
we change our guidelines on mammograms?
One radiologist, Daniel Kopans of Massachu­
setts General Hospital in Boston, plaintively
asked whether we should deny younger
women mammograms on the basis of inad­
equate data that failed to show benefit.
The Canadian study aroused enough
concern that the American Cancer Society
held a workshop in early February and the
National Cancer Institute held one last week
to review what we know about the effective­
ness of mammograms in younger women.
Rethinking Mammoaravhu
The American Cancer Society decided
that although there was not ironclad evi­
dence that mammograms help younger
women, there also was not sufficient evidence
that women in their 40s fail to benefit. The
Society decided to reconfirm its guidelines
and tell women in their 40s to continue to
have a mammogram every one to two years.
The National Cancer Institute’s meeting
was very different. Its scientists called to­
gether a wide range of experts from all sides
of the issue and convened an international
group of researchers who had new data that
might help resolve the question. Scientist
after scientist got up and said that studies
could not show a benefit for younger women
and that even a combined analysis of the
world’s best data, involving half a million
women, found no beneficial effect of
mammograms for women in their 40s.
I wrote about the National Cancer
I
Institute’s meeting, noting that it included
new data from around the world that con­
firmed the Canadians’ hotly contested find­
ings.
So why was this anything different from
the usual news story? First, the issue was
murky enough, and the interpretation poorly
enough defined, that most reporters did not
cover it. The National Cancer Institute will
not formally decide whether to revise its
mammogram guidelines for at least a month,
so this was a meeting without an obvious
conclusion. The National Cancer Institute
meeting was attended by very few members of
the press, and nearly ^1 of them were from
specialty newsletters, like Oncology News. I
believe 1 was the only person there from a
newspaper. The leading newsmagazines were
not there, nor were any television crews,
other than one from Canadian television. And
if you wanted a story that more or less writes
itself, where the news is clear and obvious,
this was not it.
The story 1 wrote, which the Times made
its off-lead for the day, was that women
essentially must be told the truth about what
we know and don’t know about the value of
mammograms. The truth, however, is com­
plicated. We know that a variety of studies so
far have failed to show a benefit for
mammography in women under age 50.
It could also be argued: Why not have a
mammogram? How could finding a tumor
early be anything but beneficial? But there
are reasons why women in their 40s might
not want mammograms if they cannot be
shown to help them. For one, the tests fail to
detect as many as 40 percent of cancers in the
denser breasts of younger women. So a nega­
tive mammogram is not necessarily a reas­
surance. At the same time, women in their
40s have a 2 percent chance per year of a false
positive test result—the finding of a lump that
is not cancerous. This requires surgery to
remove and analyze the lump. If a woman has
a mammogram every year from age 40 to age
50, she will have a 20 percent chance of
having to have an unnecessary surgical bi­
opsy. And, in the end, if mammograms
for women in their 40s do not save their
lives, what is the reason for having
them?
B
What I found startling was that What we
we had a decade of urgent recommen­
dations and lots and lots of publicity ended up with is
that scared women in their 40s to a situation in this
death. Publicity that told women they
had to have a mammogram. It was country where
going to save their lives. Article after the women who
article in newspapers and magazines
talked about breast cemcer and women are least likely
in their 40s. to have breast
All the advertising for mam­
mography shows young women. You cancer are
never see a 60-year-old woman—that’s most afraid of it
the typical breast cancer victim: a 65-
to-70-year-old woman—in a mam­ and the women
mography advertisement. It’s always who are least likely
somebody young with a beautiful body.
They are the people for whom mam­ to have any
mography has never been shown to benefit from
help and they are the people who are
least likely to get breast cancer. a mammogram
What we ended up with is a situ­ are most likely
ation in this country where the women
who are least likely to have breast to get it.
cancer are most afraid of it and the
women who are least likely to have any
benefit from a mammogram are most
likely to get it. And the older women who are
most at risk are not concerned and are not
getting mammograms and don’t think breast
cancer is really a problem for them.
I think that this story, the stoiy of
mammography, goes beyond the question of
what a woman in her 40s should do and goes
more to the question of when should we give
people advice and how clear should we be
about it? At the National Cancer Institute
meeting there were representatives there from
consumer groups who were saying we ought
to just tell women the truth. We should say,
here’s what we know and here’s what we don’t
know. Maybe we will change our minds as we
get more data.
It’s a complex story, and of course I was
exquisitely aware of the difficulty in convey­
ing this mixed message to women who are
already terrified of breast cancer. But it’s also
the sort of story that, I think, can change the
way people think about the dictums of sci­
ence and medicine. It means that sometimes
our medical advice is based on inference and
wishful thinking rather than facts and that
sometimes the best course might be to lay out
all the uncertainties before the public rather
than assume that people need hard and fast
guidelines, that equivocation would confuse
them.
Cholesterol and Children
Another stoiy with a similar message
involved cholesterol tests for children. Al­
though the American Academy of Pediatrics
advises cholesterol tests only for children
with strong family histories of heart disease,
it’s become almost routine for pediatricians
to give nearly all children and teenagers cho­
lesterol tests when they come in for routine
checkups.
I didn’t believe in routine cholesterol
tests for my children because I asked myself,
what would I do differently if my kids had high
cholesterol? But my pediatrician measured
my kids’ cholesterol and I didn’t even know it.
I sent them to the doctor for a check-up with
the babysitter and the next thing I knew I got
the cholesterol test results. I had to pay for
them too. So it was sort of a surprise.
Cholesterol testing of children has be­
come absolutely routine. It is also a money­
maker. It is a lab test and there is a lot of
advertising for quick cholesterol mea­
surements. Doctors can do it in their
offices. It is an easy way for them to
make a little extra money, I think. But
if you are going to measure cholesterol
Cholesterol
in children, then you have to say that
it makes a difference.
testing of children
The nation has been told over and has become
over again that all of us should eat less
fat to try to reduce our cholesterol
absolutely routine.
levels. But implicit in the cholesterol It is also a
testing of children with no family his­
tory of heeirt disease is the assumption
money-maker.
that it makes a difference what a child’s ... But if you are
cholesterol level is; That children with
the highest cholesterol levels today will
going to measure
be the adults with the highest levels in cholesterol in
a couple of decades and, eventually,
will be the adults coming in for bypass
children, then
surgery when their coronary arteries you have to say
become completely clogged.
But a large study of 2,377 Iowa
that it makes a
schoolchildren questioned that as­ difference.
sumption. A pediatrician. Dr. Ronald
Lauer, and a statistician. Dr. William
Clarke, of the University of Iowa, ana­
lyzed cholesterol measurements of children
taken several times when they were still in
school and also taken when they were adults.
The investigators looked, for example, at the
children whose cholesterol measurements
were above the 75th percentile on two sepa­
rate occasions—above the levels of 75 percent
of children their age. They then asked: Did
these children have high cholesterol levels as
 adults? They found that three-quarters of the
girls and more than half the boys did not have
high levels as adults.
What about the children with the very
highest levels, those in the 90th percentile of
cholesterol measurements on two separate
occasions? As adults, 57 percent of the girls
and 30 percent of the boys had normal cho­
lesterol levels.
So what does this mean about the value
of taking cholesterol measurements in chil­
dren? For one, it means that a high
cholesterol level in a child is not a good
m predictor of a high level in an adult.
Most children with high cholesterol
S<>0 what levels had normal levels as adults,
even if they made no changes in their
does this mean diet or lifestyle.
about the value of Does this mean that children
should not follow low-fat diets? Here,
taking cholesterol the story gets more complicated. If you
measurements want children to follow low-fat diets so
that those whose cholesterol is high
in children? will avoid having high cholesterol lev­
For one, it els and heart disease as adults, the
findings indicate that you might be
means that a fooling yourself. Yes, most kids who
high cholesterol have high cholesterol levels and follow
low-fat diets will have normal choles­
level in a child terol levels as adults. But so will those
is not a good children with high cholesterol levels
who change nothing about their diet.
predictor of Ifyou want to say that kids should
a high level in follow low-fat diets because it is a
healthier way to live, leading maybe to
an adult. less heart disease for the population as
a whole and possibly less colon can­
cer, most experts would agree with
that advice. But that is a very different
message. And it means that measuring
children’s cholesterol is really beside the point.
After all, no matter what the cholesterol mea­
surement turns out to be, you’ll put the kids
on a low-fat diet anyway.
Low-Fat Diets and Breast Cancer
This fixation with not diluting the public
health message with disconcerting facts shows
up over and over again. For example, a recent
study by the Nurse’s Health Group in Boston
of tens of thousands of women failed to find
any evidence that women who followed a low-
fat diet had less breast cancer than those who
ate lots of fat. The researchers conceded that
it probably will make no difference to breast
cancer risk if women forgo their low-fat diets.
But they urged me to be sure to tell women to
eat a low-fat diet anyway, to protect them­
selves from heart disease and colon cancer.
It’s as though medical experts think the
public can only hold one idea in its mind at
one time. If you say a low-fat diet does not
protect against breast cancer, they will jump
to the conclusion that a low-fat diet is useless
in general.
Since I am a reporter, not an advocate,
I politely listened to these pleas that I push
low-fat diets on our readers and decided that
the story was about breast cancer, not the
overall value of low-fat diets. And I wrote only
about breast cancer and fat in the diet.
The AIDS Risk
Finally, the problem of telling the truth
about medicine, even if some people think it
undermines the public health message they
are trying to get across, comes up in what is
probably the most explosive medical story
today—^AIDS.
A few weeks ago, the National Research
Council came out with a book about the AIDS
epidemic called The Social Impact ofAIDS. In
 It, a group of a dozen highly regarded experts
on medicine, law, ethics, and social science
described what several years of studying the
epidemic had led them to believe. AIDS, they
said, is not spreading across the country,
striking rich and poor, urban and rural dweller
alike. Although it is true that AIDS is every­
where, it definitely festers in some places emd
not others. Most of the country actually is
unscathed. But a few places, like a few
neighborhoods in New York, are devas­
B
L
B tated.
What the report said was that, in
lOok at fact, everybody in the country is not
Kimberly equally likely to be your sexual partner.
You’re going to be with people that you
Bergalis. She got know, basically. If you’re here in Ten­
AIDS from her nessee, you’re probably going to be
with someone from Tennessee, not a
dentist. Did she drug user in Harlem. The experts said
start a little that when you look for the AIDS epi­
demic, you find that it’s increasingly
epidemic? concentrated in neighborhoods in cer­
No, it died tain cities and leaving the rest of the
country alone. Yes, it’s true, if you go
with her. into one of the New York neighbor­
hoods—actually it’s a few zip codes—
where the disease is really concen­
trated and you just happen to be
unlucky enough to have sex with somebody
who’s infected, you might get AIDS. But are
you going to start a mini-epidemic in Tennes­
see? Probably not.
Look at Kmberly Bergalis. She got AIDS
from her dentist. Did she start a little epi­
demic? No, it died with her. Look at Mary
Fisher, who was speaking at the Republican
convention. She’s HfV positive. I think her
husband was a drug user. Now is Mary Fisher,
a rich Republican woman, going to start a
mini-epidemic in Florida? No, this disease is
going to die with her too.
Does this mean that most people can
forget the safe sex advice or, if they use drugs,
can share needles, as long as they dwell far
from the AIDS epicenters? Of course not.
There is some risk of infection, however small,
with risky behavior and since AIDS is deadly,
no one would advise you to take a chance. But
many in the public health field seem almost
afraid of the National Research Council’s
conclusions. One man told me, “We’ve worked
so hard to make AIDS everyone’s disease.”
That is a weird way to say it, but I think what
he was trying to say was that they worked so
hard to tell all of us that we are at risk ofAIDS.
But saying it does not make it so. Their fear is
that anyone who hears that AIDS is destroy­
ing a few small communities but is not spread­
ing to the general population will immediately
ignore all the warnings about risky behavior.
The AIDS story is complex. It has dis­
turbing nuances. And it has some provoca­
tive implications, which I think you will read
about in The New York Times soon.
But, once again, many of the most im­
portant medical stories often have more be­
neath the surface than most people realize,
and the simple story is all too often simplified.
When I and others write about the more
complex story, I think, and hope, we can
make readers come away with a fuller appre­
ciation of what authorities do and don’t know
and how they reason.
I hope that readers are stimulated to
question other nostrums as well and that the
messages from these stories stay with our
readers long after sound bites and news
fiashes from the day’s political events or
latest tragedies fade away.
Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures are available in booklet form.
For a copy, contact the School of Journalism, University
of Tennessee, Knoxville.

1989 John Noble Wilford

“Science as Exploration”
1991 Dorothy Nelkin
“Risk Communication and the Mass Media”
1993 Gina Kolata
“Medical Reporting: Where the Stoiy Lies”
Science as Exploration
by
John Noble Wilford

Senior Writer and Science Correspondent

The New York Times
and
Professor, Chair of Excellence
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing
1989-1990
School of Journalism
College of Communications
University of Tennessee

First
Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Media, and Society

September 10, 1989

John Noble Wilford, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, is senior
writer and science correspondent for The New York Times. His
books include The Mysterious History of Columbus (1991), Mars
Beckons (1990), The Riddle of the Dinosaurs (1985), The
Mapmakers (1981), and We Reach the Moon (1969).
Wilford is a graduate of the School of Journalism at the Uni-
versity of Tennessee and returned during the school year 1989-
90 to serve as the first Professor, Chair of Excellence in Sci­
ence, Technology, and Medical Writing.
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science, media,
and society was established in 1989 by Tom Hill, former
publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary Frances Hill Holton in
honor and memory of their parents.
Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949, seven
years after the government established Oak Ridge to house
workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak Ridger was the
first successful privately owned newspaper in the city and
marked an important stage in the transition of Oak Ridge from
federal operation to private ownership and self-government.
Published by
School of journalism
College of Communications
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
serial editor: Mark Littmann, Chair of Excellence in
Science, Technology, and Medical Writing
“Science as Exploration” ©1989 John Noble Wilford
Publication Authorization Number ROl-2910'56'001'92
Science as Exploration
by
John Noble Wilford
What I want to talk about today is the importance of science
journalism and, also, the excitement of science journalism. And this will
lead us into the whole idea of science as exploration.
First I’d like to tell a story. Once there was a sea captain and
everyone who knew him said that he was undoubtedly the greatest sea
captain who ever sailed the seven seas. Like many old sea captains, he was
a man of unvarying routine. Every morning he would awake at dawn just
before the change of watch. The ship’s boy would come and bring him his
tea and help him get dressed. And just before the old captain would leave
to go on deck, he would stop at his chest, take out a key and unlock it. He
would pull the drawer out, remove a piece of paper, unfold it and read it,
fold it again, lock the door and go out on deck and act the part of the
greatest sea captain in the world. The ship’s boy was intrigued. What was
it that this old captain read every time he prepared to go out on deck? Was
this the clue to his successes as a captain and navigator of the world? Well,
as it must to all men and sea captains, death finally came to this old man
and one of the first things the ship’s boy did when he went into the cabin
was to remove the key from the captain’s vest. He went over and opened
the bureau drawer and read what was on the piece of paper. It said “Star­
board is right. Port is left.”
Ever since I heard that story a few years ago, I’ve taken great
comfort, because I am not a scientist. Any investigative reporter who
chose to could probably find locked up in a drawer somewhere a transcript
that will prove I’m not a scientist and never had any great preparation in
science. But journalists, of course, are by definition jacks of all trades. So
each day we have to brief ourselves, do some necessary preparation and
then go out on deck and tell the world that we’re the greatest in science
 journalism or political journalism or whatever it is. It only takes a little bit
of preparation.
The one thing to bear in mind in science journalism is the
importance of it. My message here is to editors as well as to people who are
reporters or people who think they will become editors or reporters. And
the message is, not to think of science journalism as an arcane specialty off
at the far end of the city room. When you think about some of the great
stories these days, you will realize that they are science stories; at least they
have a large component that is science. Drugs. Illegal drugs. Now that’s a
political story, that’s an economic story, that’s a crime story; but it is also a
science story. In fact, at The New York Times our coverage of the drug
situation is coordinated by an assistant editor of our science department,
who brings in, of course, political and foreign correspondents, economic
correspondents, etc.
Other stories that are big these days: the ozone hole. That’s a
science story. This is a problem of our environment that was discovered
through science. The greenhouse effect - the warming of our globe.
Energy. Cold fusion. Whatever happened to cold fusion? Fusion is an
energy and economic story, but it’s also a science story. Many of these are
stories that are alerting us to problems in our society, which is why they are
not just science stories. They are stories of great breadth.
In the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, a colleague of
mine, Dan Coleman, who’s a psychologist, has an essay in which he’s
discussing some of the definitions of news. He takes as his text the fact that
some people say news is what people react to and big news is, of course,
what people react to in a big way. Being a psychologist, he began to think
in terms of how people react - how the brain reacts. He said, of course, a
lot of news is about something that is different, surprising, shocking,
threatening. This causes a response in the most primeval part of our brain,
which is the alert system for danger. This is what kept us going as a species
long before civilization. When you saw an animal that could attack you,
you were alert then to take flight or to stand and fight. If you saw a snake,
some of that old primeval brain reacts; for most of us, when we see a snake
now, there’s the same old reaction. So Coleman called this “reptilian
news.” This is the kind of news that alerts you that something is unusual
and threatening to our society.
Of course, the more modern part of the brain, the part of the brain
that really defines us as human beings, is the thinking part of the brain.
This is the part that allows you to take input and, as they say, “massage it,”
to work it through, to think in terms of alternatives, to think in terms of
the future and the past, and try to resolve a problem. This is the thinking
part of the brain, and stories that prompt this kind of reaction are “thinking
news.” The problem is that most of our news is treated as reptilian news.
Coleman uses one illustration of the difference between the two.
If a bridge collapses or there is a report that a bridge is in danger of collaps­
ing, that is reptilian news. That alerts people that danger lies out there,
and usually that’s about as far as it goes. If you are going to make a “think­
ing” story out of this, you begin to ask questions in your coverage about
what this means. Is the infrastructure of this country or the city or the state
in danger of collapsing? Has there been neglect in our society in maintain­
ing its capital investment? And, of course, these are the kinds of things
that you don’t usually get on page one of newspapers or on the six o’clock
news. I think science news gives you a good opportunity to do both, both
the reptilian coverage and the thinking coverage, which is why science
fascinates me as an area of specialty and why I find it continually challeng­
ing.
For example, the greenhouse effect. A year ago we had all sorts of
stories about the global warming. This was when we were having a
drought. This past summer we had too much rain, so there were not as
many stories about global warming. But if there really is global warming,
one wet summer does not change the fact of that. You still have a build-up
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 100 years of increasing fossil fuel
consumption. And from a lot of the evidence you do have a danger that by
slow increments the temperatures, the global temperatures, are increasing
and you can extrapolate - think - toward the time when, if you have a one-
degree or two-degree increase, you can start having a one-foot or two-foot
increase in sea levels. Then you see what kind of trouble we’re getting into.
In my own science writing. I’ve done serious stories of that nature.
But I don’t make apologies for my coverage of dinosaurs either, which is a
subject dear to my heart. Dinosaurs are literally reptilian news. Dinosaurs
are, in a way, safe reptilian news. They were a great menace 65 million
years ago and perhaps some of our wee mammal ancestors took fright every
time they saw a dinosaur coming down the savannah. Anyway, in recent
research on dinosaurs, people have begun to make some connections
between what happened to the dinosaurs and what could happen to all
species. A prehistoric reptilian story becomes today’s thinking story. The
dinosaurs died out. The big question is, how and why? We don’t know
that answer. We don’t know exactly what happened to them. But there
are some theories with some very strong supporting evidence that a
catastrophe occurred 65 million years ago. Whether it was a comet or an
asteroid that hit, something caused chaos throughout the world. And this
brought about the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and many, many other
species.
In the course of these kinds of studies we have discovered that
periodically, perhaps every 26 million years, there have been mass extinc­
tions. We’re not due for one, incidentally, for another 11 million years.
What does this periodicity tell us? It tells us mass extinctions are part of the
natural process of Earth. It also tells us that we probably wouldn’t be here
today if there hadn’t been a mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million
years ago. We would not have been able to evolve to where we are now if
the dinosaurs still were the dominant creatures or had been the dominant
creatures for a lot longer.
Also, these studies have given us an understanding of how a global
catastrophe can result from the impact of an asteroid or comet. Debris and
gases and water vapor will probably envelop the globe, causing a darkness
for months and months. This will lower temperatures because sunlight
can’t come in. It will stop photosynthesis. Everything will come to a
screeching halt.
We’re talking about exploration now. We’re exploring the past on
Earth, and we’re exploring the possible future. From these studies have also
come a sense of what could happen if you had total nuclear war. Much the
same things could happen. With nuclear bombs going off all over the
northern hemisphere, you could create debris, gases and total darkness of
the globe. This scenario has become known as “nuclear winter.” It’s
controversial, and there has been some revision modifying the scary
prospect first enunciated. People now call it not “nuclear winter” but
maybe “nuclear fell.” In any case, it is a warning to us that you do not
enter lightly into any kind of nuclear conflict. Anybody in high policy
circles who talks of winning a nuclear war is crazy and is taking an undue
risk with the lives of the people of the world.
So we learn a lot of things through science reporting. We learn a
lot, not just how things work but how our lives are becoming different, how
they can change over time.
In the course of research on my dinosaur book, I was talking to a
colleague of Luis Alvarez, the Nobel physicist at Berkeley. Luis Alvarez and
his son Walter were the originators of the asteroid-extinction hypothesis.
This colleague was saying of Luis, who died just a few months ago, drat he Jupiter and its Great Red Spot
was a great reader of the 19th century exploration and 18th century
exploration, too. He had read everything written about Capt. James Cook,
who, incidentally, probably was the greatest sea captain who ever lived.
Alvarez also read avidly about Sir Richard Burton. This is not the guy who
was married to Elizabeth Taylor. This was the man who explored Arabia
and the Nile in the 19th century. He said, “You know, if Luis had lived in
the 19th century, he would have been an explorer. But as a matter of fact,
in the 20th century, the explorers are our scientists. So Luis is doing what
he would have been doing in the 19th century.” All photographs courtesy ofNASA/JPL
 The rocky landscape
of Mars

Rings of Uranus, with Neptune and its Great

two shepherd moons of Dark Spot, a storm
bright ring circled about the size of Earth
 That thought has stuck with me; the explorers of our century are
scientists. We don’t have any more new geographic area to explore on this
Earth, but we do have ideas to explore. And we do have other worlds to
explore, and much of my career has been involved in that kind of explora­
tion - space exploration. That’s the really exciting part. The important
part is doing stories about the greenhouse effect, about acid rain, about
some of the reptilian news that you try to translate into thinking news. But
the really stirring and exciting things, as far as I’m concerned, are the
stories of science as exploration. It is exploring the past through the
paleoanthropologists who are trying to determine our origins as a species -
the johansons and the Leakeys. It is exploring the past through the
dinosaurs. The ultimate in exploration of the past is what astrophysicists
are doing when they try to determine the beginning of the universe.
Trying to understand the origin of the universe and trying to figure out how
and when it’s going to end - these are some of the most exciting things in
science.
Another area, probably the hottest area in science research right
now, is in biochemistry, particularly the work with genetics. We’re actually
mapping the genome - the genetic material that makes up our genetic
heredity. In the course of this we’re determining the genetic points of
origin for disease, where something goes wrong and the result is Alzheimer’s
disease or diabetes or something else. This is exploration of the human
species.
Exploration, I think, is what we have been doing in the solar
system these past decades. For the first time, in our generation we’re seeing
worlds that before we either could not see at all or they were mere pin­
points of light. Blobs. Fuzzy blobs in telescopes. And now we’re seeing
them as distinct worlds. We’re finding out that we have a pretty good deal
here on Earth. That there is nothing out there that is going to make us
want to move tomorrow. We’re finding that there is almost undoubtedly
no life elsewhere in the solar system. That doesn’t mean that there is no
life elsewhere - somewhere - but still we’re beginning to appreciate where
we live in this little part of the universe.
So I’m going to have a magic lantern show for you on what I think
have been some of the most exciting aspects of the space program in the
last twenty years. This has to do with planetary exploration. This is very
much on my mind, because I just came back a few days ago from Pasadena.
Just up the hillside from the Rose Bowl, to put you in perspective, is the jet
Propulsion Laboratory, where they control the interplanetary missions.
I’m going to take you from the Sun out. We begin at Mercury,
which was explored for the first time in 1974 by Mariner 10. It just flew by.
Actually it flew by three times. It went into an orbit around the Sun in
lo, moon of Jupiter, with volcano in eruption at upper left

such a way that it re-rendezvoused with Mercury twice and discovered a
world that looks very much like our Moon. It’s beaten with craters. One of
the more interesting things is that all these planets are different. This seems
to be a planet without a crust. What you see pretty much is a core. It’s an
all-core planet. What happened, we don’t know.
Next is Venus. This is the planet most nearly like Earth in size
and proximity to the Sun, but which is totally shrouded with clouds of
carbon dioxide, laced with sulfuric acid. Not a nice place to visit. Down
on the surface the probes have determined that the temperatures get up to
about 900°F, which is beyond the melting point of lead. Venus has been
explored a number of times by American spacecraft; even more times by
the Russians. We have a spacecraft right now on its way to Venus - the
Magellan - which was launched in May and will arrive next August, going
into orbit. It has a high-powered radar imagery system which can penetrate
those clouds and map pretty much the whole planet for the first time. So
then we can see what Venus is like. The big question about Venus is, how
come a planet roughly the same size and roughly the same distance from
the Sun as Earth went this direction? This is the original runaway green­
house effect. The exploration of Venus gave people a lot of the ideas
they’re now working with in discussing the potential for a greenhouse effect
on Earth.
In 1976, a Viking spacecraft took the first picture from the surface
of Mars. One of the more exciting times of my life was seeing that picture
form line by line. It was a suspenseful moment. The picture showed that
there are a lot of rocks on Mars. The main purpose of the mission was to
see if there was life on Mars, and no life was found. But there are a few
little strange squiggly pieces of evidence that make people wonder. Mars
could be a big focus for exploration after the turn of the century, perhaps
even in cooperation with the Soviet Union. Which would be a welcome
turn of events, considering the space age began with rugged competition.
There are two Voyager spaceprobes - Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.
Both went to Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 1 was directed to go very close
by Titan, which is the large moon of Saturn, and in the course of being
drawn in by the gravity of Titan was thrust up out of the plane of the solar
system. So Voyager 1 has been for several years going up, climbing out of
the solar system looking for the edge. Voyager 2 was directed in such a way
that when it passed by Saturn its trajectory was altered by Saturnian gravity
so it could go on to Uranus, assuming that it kept functioning. At Uranus
its trajectory was altered by gravity again - no rockets to do any of this - to
get it on out to Neptune.
In their first planetary encounter, both Voyagers passed by Jupiter.
Jupiter is an artist’s delight. It must really fire the imagination of artists to
see it. We knew it was the largest planet in the solar system, an almost star.
If it had been just a little bigger, a little bit more massive, it might have
turned into a companion star to the Sun. Its atmospheric bands of various
colors are like jet streams. Amid those bands and stripes is a large dot.
That’s the Great Red Spot. Two or three Earths could fit into that red
smudge. All the ovals and squiggles in Jupiter’s atmosphere are swirling
wind patterns. They are mostly counterclockwise storm systems. The
atmosphere’s mostly hydrogen.
lo is the innermost large moon of Jupiter. It looks like a big pizza
pie in the sky. Voyager pictures showed volcanoes erupting on lo. lo is
mostly sulfur, so presumably they are sulfuric volcanoes. lo became only
the second object in the solar system known to have active volcanism -
Earth being the first place. There is evidence on Mars of active volcanoes
in the past.
The dazzling colors of Jupiter are followed by the beauty of Saturn.
I recall a few years before Voyager 1 reached Saturn being out in Arizona
on a mountaintop with some astronomers in an observatory. We spent the
night looking at Saturn through a telescope. TTey were trying to study the
rings. Astronomers don’t work the way they used to work. They don’t
really look in the eyepiece and say “Ah, there’s Saturn.” They sit down in
a control room and operate the knobs of computers, and they see the
images on the computer screen, not in the actual telescope. I prevailed
upon them to let me look through the eyepiece a few times at Saturn. You
see a little bit of the rings and a pale yellow ball. It sort of reminds you of a
faded, golden planet, something you might find in a trunk in the attic of
your grandmother’s house. It’s a delicate, beautiful thing. But once
Voyager got up close, you could see the colors of various gases. You could
see storms. And you could see in detail the beautiful rings. They’re even
more resplendent than we imagined.
Uranus was a bit of a disappointment. It wasn’t photogenic.
Uranus doesn’t have much active weather. It’s just a pale, placid ball of
gas. Uranus and Neptune are almost twins, the way Earth and Venus are
almost twins in mass, diameter, etc. Scientists didn’t know what we were
going to find when we got to Neptune. Were we going to find another
Uranus?
As Voyager 2 sailed by Uranus, we had our first look at its rings
and ten previously undiscovered moons. It is pretty much agreed now that
the debris that is collected to form these rings is from broken up moons.
But how do you keep the ring material from diffusing, how do you keep it
in line? There’s now a theory based on these observations at Uranus that
you have shepherd moons. Shepherd moons are little bodies - one on the
outside and one on the inside of each ring - whose gravitational force acts
to keep the material in the rings so it does not fell onto the planet.
Last “stop” for Voyager 2 was Neptune. Neptune has a Great Dark
Spot that, interestingly, is at almost the exact latitude as the Great Red
Spot on Jupiter, 20 degrees south. The atmospheres of Uranus and Nep­
tune contain a lot of methane, which accounts for their blueness. Methane
reflects light in blue.
Like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, Neptune has rings. Depending
on how you count them, there are three or maybe five rings of Neptune.
One of the big questions before Voyager arrived was about the rings. From
Earth there had been observations that indicated yes, Neptune had rings
but they were not complete rings. Astronomers called them “ring arcs.”
You’d see about 10 degrees of material here, 10 degrees there. There was
dumpiness. Ring arcs. How do you have that? Neptune must have some
very strange moons to create this phenomenon. As it got closer and flew
by. Voyager’s camera could see better and could see that Neptune’s arcs
were actually complete rings. Sometimes they were clumpy in spots, and so
from Earth they would look like they were not complete. But there are
three complete rings, maybe five. In between the outer and the inner
bright ring is a lot of material that may be another ring, but no one is sure
about that.
Before Voyager, no one had ever seen surface features on Triton,
the largest moon of Neptune. Now we know the surface looks like a
cantaloupe. Turns out it is not as large as we thought. It is about 1,700
miles in diameter, which is about 400 miles less than our Moon. But you
can see what looks like some meteorite impacts, and you see ridges - long
serpentine ridges. Those were the first evidence that there was a third place
in the solar system with active volcanoes. The thinking is that most of
Triton has an ice covering and a thin atmosphere. Most of the atmosphere
is nitrogen with some methane. Most of the surface is nitrogen ice and
methane ice. It is a blue moon in parts and it’s also a pink moon. A
perfect moon for a nursery - blue and pink. The pink comes from where
you have radiation damage to the methane ice. The chemical reactions
caused by the radiation damage leave a pink hue. The streaks, the ridges,
look as if that is where there were cracks in the icy surface through which
liquid nitrogen from below oozed out in a sort of a slow-flow volcanism.
No spewing like Pele but just a slow ooze. That’s caused a lot of those
features on Triton.
As Voyager 2 sped past Neptune, it looked back to see the sunlit
rims of Neptune and Triton as crescent moons. It was a sad farewell.
Voyager 2 had been traveling for 12 years, 4.4 billion miles. It was
crippled. The instrument platform could barely move to get into position,
and the spacecraft’s computer had some memory losses from shortly after
the launch, but Voyager 2 hung in, and it is still going out. About ten days
ago, at the final press briefing, the chief scientist, Edward Stone, ended his
presentation by quoting T. S. Eliot, “Not farewell/ But fare forward,
voyagers.”
So Voyager is faring forward. If it continues at this rate, and
scientists say it has enough electric generating capacity and enough steering
fuel, it could operate for another 25 years. When it went by Triton, the
gravity of Triton pulled it down so it’s going south of the plane of the solar
system. Voyager 1 is going north and Voyager 2 is going south. Two
earlier probes, very small probes. Pioneers 10 and 11, are going east and
going west, respectively. All four are operating, and so we’re going in four
directions trying to find the edge of the solar system. To some people the
edge of the solar system is the outermost planet, and right now that
outermost planet is Neptune. But the solar wind, the particles and electri­
fied gases that come out from tbfe Sun, are still going at supersonic speeds
way out at Neptune. And still going,where Pioneer 10 and 11 are. Some­
where out there they will hit a point where the incoming interstellar gases
are stronger than the outgoing interplanetary gases. At that point there
should be a turbulent boundary. These spacecraft, through their instru­
ments - there’ll be nothing to take a picture of - should be able to detect
the particle turbulence at that boundary point. So then we will find,
sometime after the turn of the century, where the solar system ends.
While covering the Voyager mission, I was reminded of another
quote from T. S. Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Science as exploration is going out and looking at Mars and
Neptune. It is going out with the Hubble Space Telescope next year to be
able to look almost to the edge, not of the solar system, but the edge of the
universe; therefore, to the beginning of time. These are explorations, but
why are we doing it? It is part of our culture, yes, but why are we doing it?
It is because we really want to know who we are and where we are in the
universe. It is an exercise of the mind and nourishment for the human
spirit. So science is more than just trying to figure out how things work,
how to make a better gum wrapper. Science is exploring to find out who
we are and where we are and possibly what our future is.
J
J on Franklin

Sixth Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture

on Science, Society, and the Mass Media

March 17,1997
School of Journalism
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
The Alfred and Julia H!ill Lecture
series on science, society, and the mass media was estab­
lished in 1989 by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak
Ridger, and Mary Frances Hill Holton in honor and
memory of their parents.
Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger
in 1949, seven years after the government established
Oak Ridge to house workers on the atomic bomb project.
The Oak Ridger was the first successful privately owned
newspaper in the city and marked an important stage in
the transition of Oak Ridge from federal operation to
private ownership and self-government.
Jon Franklin won the first
Pulitzer Prizes ever awarded in fea­
ture writing ("Mrs. Kelly's Mon­
ster," 1979) and in explanatory jour­
nalism ("The Mind Fixers," 1985).
In addition to his many sci­
ence stories for the Baltimore
Evening Sun, Franklin wrote four
books about medical science:
Shocktrauma (with Alan Doelp),
1980; Not Quite a Miracle (with Alan
Doelp), 1983; Guinea Pig Doctors (with John Sutherland),
1984; and Molecules of the Mind, 1986.
Critical acclaim for Franklin's use of the literary
techniques found in novels and short stories in his nonfic­
tion works led him to present his ideas and experiences to
aspiring authors in Writing for Story, 1986.
Franklin was born in Enid, Oklahoma in 1942,
joined the U.S. Navy at 17, and spent the next eight years
as a Navy journalist, including three years aboard aircraft
carriers in the Pacific. He worked for a Maryland weekly
newspaper while attending the University of Maryland's
College of Journalism, from which he graduated with
high honors in 1970. He worked the next fifteen years for
the Baltimore Evening Sun, beginning on the rewrite desk
and ending as the paper's science feature writer.
1 r-Mfr\ fKo T Tr»i\rc»rciH7 KyfarvlanH
College of Journalism in 1986 as a professor. In 1989 he
moved west to be professor and chairman of the Depart­
ment of Journalism at Oregon State University. In 1991 he
became professor of journalism and now professor of
creative writing at the University of Oregon. He founded
and serves as moderator for WriterL, an electronic discus­
sion group for professional nonfiction writers.
He and his wife Lynn live in the Oregon Coast
Range.
 I wanted to be a science writer for the
same reason that many of you probably wanted to be
scientists. For my generation, at least in our youth, truth
and beauty were as one. 1 dabbled in poetry and paleon­
tology, astronomy and architecture. 1 finally chose writ­
ing because it gave me art and science as well. I'd never
heard the phrase "science writer" but science was always
my subject.
When 1 went into daily newspapering 1 told my
editor 1 wanted to be a science writer. He grunted and said
the paper didn't need one of those. But history was against
him, and the young kid he'd hired had a talent for finding
science in any story he was assigned. Early on 1 turned a
story about the city's rat eradication program into a piece
that could have blended seamlessly with Hans Zinsser's
Rats, Lice and History. In my hands a zoning story meta­
morphosed into a piece on urban demographics. A school
bond issue assignment came back to my editor in the form
of an un-rejectable profile of a chemistry teacher. The
editors grumbled but the readers loved it — and soon
everyone outside the paper referred to me as a "science
writer." 1 will never forget the great victory it was, the first
time my boss called me that.
Or at least it seemed a victory at the time. Now it
makes me incomparably sad. 1 was so young. We all were.
And so, then, was our world.
World War 11 was the turning point of our age.
After that science ceased to be an obscure practice of
erratic geniuses with bubbling test tubes and Van de
Graaff generators. Science won the war and produced the
industrial momentum that carried us into a time of great
progress.
But high technology had a split personality. Its
very conception was shrouded in secret, so that it both
existed and didn't exist. I don't know about Oak Ridge but
if you look at a vintage map of central New Mexico, circa
1945, Los Alamos just wasn't there. You could see its lights
1
from Santa Fe, but it wasn't there. Military necessity not­
withstanding, I think the secret kept so well in part because
it struck a Freudian harmony. We were afraid. We were
ashamed. Maybe those are not the correct words, but
whatever was happening was at least in one respect like
sex, in that it could not bear public witness.
A.fterward science remained separate
from what we thought of as "normal life." Some of us kids
were interested in science, but others thought us odd. At
one point I argued with one of my teachers that human
beings would soon travel in space. The teacher called my
mother, and my mother was so concerned she took me to
a psychiatrist. He gave me a tongue-lashing about terror­
izing grownups, and reassured my mother I was just going
through a phase.
The strangeness of science to average Americans
was a measure of their denial. I have just spent several
years reading from the Fifties, everything from comic
books to Look magazine, and science was oozing into
contemporary life through every open pore, changing and
redefining it at every level. Portable radios, automatic
transmissions, antibiotics became commonplace. Televi­
sion flickered alive. In the wake of agricultural change the
great migration from the farm to the city was completed.
Society got more complex and interwoven. This was all
accompanied by a bright, Mary Poppins optimism that
soimded a bit tinny even at the time.
I mean, it was bizarre. The optimism was a thin
veneer over what I can only call stark terror. The world, we
were told, could vanish in two hours. Guided missiles
would later cut that to fifteen minutes. We were taught to
crawl under our desks when the sirens went, and I think
the grownups had convinced themselves that might really
help. But we knew better. Tm talking grade school now.
Nuclear terror pervaded all of life, subsuming
deeper terrors that were ultimately more important.
Progress was wonderful but there was the feeling we were
outdriving our cultural lights. Men whose fathers had
plowed fields with mules now earned their livelihoods
sitting at desks, moving bits of paper. Women prepared
canned food, watched television...my God, they even
wore pants! The children were unemployed and out of
control, and the phrase "juvenile delinquency" was intro­
duced into the common language. There was poison in
the water — fluoride, it was. Joe McCarthy waved a
handful of documents that he said proved the State De­
partment was full of communists...and the nation be­
lieved him.
My point, lest we squirm by it, is that the very
fabric of the postwar era was a tapestry of science and
technology, and if its woof was optimism and innocence,
its warp was the deepest kind of horror and the most
degrading kind of corruption.
From the beginning a few journalists had
written about things scientific, of course, but they were
few. It wasn't until the Sixties that journalism could no
longer ignore science. Editors had to do something. "Do­
ing something," to an editor, means assigning someone to
it. Ah, the fates, they are fickle. Something pops into an
editor's head, he scans the newsroom, and his eyes come
to rest on you. Take him. He's not doing anything important
at the moment. Just like that, your life changes. Walter
Sullivan, a name you may recognize, was a music writer.
Science meanwhile was expanding far ahead of
the average literacy curve. When Sputnik went up in 1957
my science teacher, who was also the coach, gathered us all
around to reassure us that it was all a Big Red Lie. There
was no Sputnik. He knew that because it violated one of
the basic laws of physics, to wit: What goes up must come
down. There were, as I say, two Americas.
Physics was already an industry, having followed
a growth curve that would later be duplicated by other
3 4
sciences. There were thousaiids of physicists at work,
discovering things, but I'd like to focus here on an obser­
vation made by a fellow called C.P. Snow.
Snow was a British physicist who had helped
build the bomb and then later joined the cold war weap­
ons bureaucracy. But he was also a novelist (and a rather
good one), and as a novelist he was required to attend
numerous academic cocktail parties. Because he wrote
about the administration of science, these gatherings at­
tracted faculty members from both the sciences and the
humanities.
Those of you whose existence
predates the popularity of Perrier will Our culture was
remember the cocktail party as the high separating into
water mark of civilized boredom. two parts,
Snow, in the grip of this boredom, scientists and
amused himself by observing his fel­ everyone else.
low party-goers. And he noticed some­
thing rather odd; Scientists and hu­
manists had a marked tendency to drift apart. It wasn't
that the two groups hated each other, but they had little in
the way of common language or interests. They tended to
think differently. It was awkward for a physicist and a
rhetorician to discuss child-rearing. They were polite, ate
the olives out of their martinis, and drifted on in search of
more suitable companions. The humanists and scientists
aggregated in separate groups, birds of a feather.
at Snow observed was a cleavage
that would grow for the remainder of the century. Our
culture was separating into two parts, scientists and ev­
eryone else. Most people were technologically ignorant.
Those in the know composed an increasingly elite aristoc­
racy that held power by its command of counterintuitive
knowledge.
This was not new. Since the beginning of the
Enlightenment people had tended to be either very liter-
 ate in science or not literate at all. This ground was
famously fought over in the eighteenth century by the
rationalist Voltaire and the romanticist Rousseau. Voltaire
had his way in the end, but Rousseaueans have often
formed a separate class of technological naysayers. After
World War II the schism was exacerbated by the pace of
technological events. By 1960 it was palpable even at an
■ academic reception.
The rift was definitely there,
The universal and it was definitely increasing, and
experience on while we may argue about the social
the science seismology involved, there is one thing
beat was that that any science writer can tell you for
the reporting certain. And that is that the laboratory
was a piece of was on one side of the fault line and the
newsroom the other.
cake.
river of language is deep. Most
journalists who occupy beats are called "reporters," as in
"court reporter," "city hall reporter," or "Washington
reporter" — at least until they became columnists or
pundits. So it's remarkable that anyone who got the
science beat instantly became a "science writer." But the
universal experience on the science beat was that the
reporting was a piece of cake. There was news every­
where, and people were eager to give it to you. The
difficult part was figuring out what they were talking
about and reducing it to the vernacular.
Everything changed when you crossed the cul­
tural barricades. The language underwent dramatic con­
versions, as did perceptions of relevance. Scientists saw
the world as theory and fact, observation and prediction,
statistical significance and probability. The rest of the
world titrated experience in terms of motive and morality,
right and justice, miracles and fate.
In some respects Walter Sullivan, who covered
the physical sciences in a day when scientists were still
5 6
revered, had it easy. If the reader misunderstood black
holes or the space-time continuum, little harm was done.
But when the second generation of science writers came
along the action was in biology and medicine. There is a
law of psychology that says our perspective on any given
subject is degraded by its proximity to our selves—which
is probably why we know more about astronomy than we
do about human nature. In any event biology was closer,
the reader was full of prejudices, and what you don't
know about medicine can indeed hurt you. A lot of people
are killed by their ignorance of their own bodies.
The first of my cohort came along about the time
electron microscopes produced the first images of vi­
ruses. Suddenly everyone was talking about viruses. Vi­
ruses were indeed important, scientifically, because they
contained all the essential elements of genetic program­
ming. If you understood biology you knew that very
quickly now somebody was going to figure out how the
genetic code was packed in there. And people tried to
write that story.
But what caught the interest of editors and the
public? Not some esoterica about replication. No, no, no!
Everyone wanted to know whether or not the virus was alive.
The lay culture was about a hundred years behind the
molecular biologists, and was thinking in terms of vital
principle. Viruses could vacillate between being a crystal
and being a piece of life, and people were stunned by the
mechanistic implications. In the mid Eifties the popular
press printed endless discussions of whether or not vi­
ruses were alive. The reporters went to all the right
scientists and asked all the wrong questions.
They knew they were the wrong questions; they
had to know. Certainly the scientists knew. But what was
important didn't get into print. A few years later the
discovery of the genetic code in DNA came as a total shock
to the public psyche.
This is the way it was. Biochemistry was
 deconstructing life and people wanted to know if fluoride
was really a poison. They still do, many of them. Science
writers mentioned life in the universe and the public
thought UFO. We wanted to talk about cancer science.
What they wanted was hope and miracle cures.
Scientists are forever complaining that they are
misunderstood and misrepresented, and 1 agree. But imag­
ine what it's like to be the guy in the middle, to be caught
up in the distortion process, to find yourself bargaining
passionately for a tad more accuracy in
a story, say, about UFOs or cold fusion.
So we weren’t So we weren't science report­
science ers, we were science writers, and our
reporters, we job was interpretation. We science writ­
ers learned how sausage was made,
were science
and worked within the system to com­
writers, and our
municate more clearly and more accu­
job was rately, not to say more truthfully. But
interpretation. the distortion began as soon as the
copy left our hands.
No, let me be brutally honest. Distortion began
the very moment we conceived the story, as we angled our
perspective to please our editors. As soon as we picked up
the phone we started censoring ourselves, second-guess­
ing the story, trying somehow make something useful out
of whatever we had. A lot of my colleagues will deny this,
but 1 think the result speaks for itself.
Science, whatever its complaints about journal­
ism, almost always came out on the glorious end of the
story. That's why it could stay above the fray. Our ten­
dency, with certain exceptions, was to idolize science. The
public bought this. Science was Teflon, science spoke for
Truth. In my era we didn't do investigative reporting on
science, except maybe around the edges. Newsrooms are
intensely political places and muckraking is a weapon
wielded by kill reporters against political hard targets. We
never, ever, went after science. Science was sacrosanct.
7 8
Scientists thought of themselves as apolitical.
That they had that luxury was a measure of the privilege
they enjoyed. In our political system nothing is apolitical.
As soon as science started being financed by public dol­
lars it was political. Science was the darling of both
parties. Liberals had backed science from the very begin­
ning of the Enlightenment, and conservatives had come
aboard because of the Cold War. Scientists, innocents that
they were, confused being in political favor with being
apolitical.
It is useful to think of science as the
faith of the Enlightenment. Scientists hate this.
They don't want the responsibilities of priesthood. But
the role is embedded in the most fundamental first dogma
of Enlightenment philosophers and scientists. In the Me­
dieval we thought the world was an illusion, created by
Satan, and it was faith, the wisdom of the heart, that was
pure. Now we think the world is reality and faith is an
illusion. 1 have a whole lecture I give about how we cast
scientists as priests, in their white cloaks, with their
stethoscopes or whatever. Oh, sure, beginning with New­
ton science gave religion lip service, but with every
"amen" they moved God yet another step away from
daily life, until they had Flim tucked back somewhere
behind the big bang. Science can deny its religious role as
much as it likes, but when it's done denying we'll all
genuflect. This sacred atmosphere was the air a science
writer breathed.
The human mind was a duality, theme and
counter-theme. History was made of that. In the Medi­
eval, rationality was a counter-theme; in the Enlighten­
ment, Medieval thinking became a counter-theme to
science. Such thinking favors emotional truth over em­
pirical truth. I referred earlier to Voltaire and Rousseau.
Voltaire championed science, reason and progress;
Rousseau's themes were echoed in a series of uprisings in
which peasants wrecked the mechanical looms that were
putting cottage weavers out of business. A number of
insurgents were caught and hanged. Legend says that
Ned Ludd, their dimwitted leader, was among them. He
was the Forrest Gump of his time. Many remember him
today as a martyr.
By the Seventies, when I went to work in Balti­
more, Snow's cultural gap had become a chasm. Earlier
science writers had found ignorance a problem; now there
was hostility as well. You had to be an oyster not to notice
it. Many journalists turned against science, were articu­
late about it. Animal rights activists called you at 3 a.m.
and told you what dress your daughter had worn to class
that day.
I am aware that most Americans still tell pollsters
they believe in science. But talk to those people; the so-
called "science" they believe in includes astrology, yoga,
and ESP. They don't know what science IS. In one study
of American science literacy, half did not understand that
the Earth travels around the Sun. Only 6 percent of adults
could be considered scientifically literate. More than half
the students at Hollins College believed in ghosts and
mental telepathy.
If you believe in the power of the press the most
frightening poll was taken at the Columbia graduate
school of journalism, one of my profession's most elite
institutions. Fifty-seven percent of the student journalists
believed in ESP, 57 percent believed in dousing, 47 per­
cent in aura reading, and 25 percent in the lost continent
of Atlantis. Another poll showed that two thirds of news­
paper managing editors thought humans and dinosaurs
lived at the same time, and that there was a "dark" side of
the Moon, upon which light never fell.
In the late 1970s I was forced to rethink my
journalistic strategy. I had been reporting and explaining
discoveries, but my stories were not being widely read.
I generally used the word "science" early in the
9 10
story, thinking it would attract readers. The word gener­
ally ended up in the headline. But I now realized that the
effect was to tell general readers what to avoid. They
might trust science in theory, but in practice it had bad
personal associations. It confused them, made them feel
negative about themselves. Science pages ghettoized sci­
ence news, gave people a whole section they could throw
away unread.
There was something more sinister afoot, as well.
As attitudes changed, editors started wanting a certain
negative spin on science stories. If you didn't comply you
got played inside, or your existence was otherwise made
uncomfortable. Some science writers, especially those
who identified with the ecology movement, saw hostility
to science as a path to success. Many reporters, outspo­
kenly neutral on other topics, found it easy to align
themselves with the anti-science fac­
tion. This was often couched in terms
favoring plurality, an openness toward
The turning
"other ways of knowing." point for me
The turning point for me was was when Three
when Three Mile Island blew. Mile Island
I am aware that Three Mile blew.
Island did not "blow," but I'm talking
journalism here, not science — and in the newsroom, the
story went off like Eniwetok. My editors didn't send me,
though. They saw me as biased toward science, and so
they assigned a environmental advocate who also hap­
pened to be outspokenly against nuclear power. The
resulting headlines implied that Baltimore was in immi­
nent danger. Years later, when Chernobyl went, one of the
wire services moved a story that said 200,000 people were
killed in the first few minutes. That sounded reasonable to
wire editors.
This isn't an argument for nuclear power. Tm just
relating experiences that you can appreciate. If this was a
more biological audience I'd tell you different horror
 stories. I actually have more of those, because most of my
work was in medicine, biochemistry, neuropsychology,
and the like.
These stories always have a personal side. I hap­
pened to be a gardener, and mine was the kind of news­
room where people brought in their produce and piled it
on a table for others to take home. But
at the end of the day my tomatoes, my
Once I started cukes, my cantaloupes... they were still
sitting on the table. This happened
down the road
several times and I was really hurt, so
of leaving the
I asked one of my friends. He hemmed
word ‘science’ and hawed and said, well, Franklin,
out of my you're a scientist and so they don't
stories, I wrote know WHAT you may have done to
about science those vegetables, or what you put on
as though it them, or anything.
I wasn't a scientist. I only as­
were a normal
sociated with scientists. But that was
human activity.
enough. They were afraid of me.
It was said at that time that there were
more scientists working than had existed in all the years
since Newton. Many were training graduate students and
postdocs, so that there were ten scientists to take the place
of each one who retired. This had been going on for
decades, and there was an expectation of continued ex­
pansion. They were wonderful years for me, too. Once I
started down the road of leaving the word "science" out
of my stories, I wrote about science as though it were a
normal human activity. That sold surprisingly well. Pretty
soon I was concentrating on essays and narrated stories,
and getting a nice slice of readership. I won some prizes,
which makes newsroom life easier, and I started thinking
about books.
Truly I loved that life. It gave me access to all these
great minds on the cutting edge of knowledge. Once I
11
asked a Nobel prizewinner for some advice. He was
having a meeting at the time with several senior scientists.
He shooed them out and spent the next three hours
explaining restriction enzymes to me. Isn't that an amaz­
ing story? Yet it's true. It happened all the time.
Anyway, I was happy and science was good and
the money was flowing. Richard Nixon, echoing John
Kennedy's promise to land men on the Moon by 1970,
vowed to cure cancer in ten years. I didn't know a single
cancer scientist who thought that likely, but nobody would
say so on the record. They winked at me. They wanted a
piece of the action.
I am aware that there are exceptions to this bright
picture, and they're significant. The post-Sputnik boom in
physics had by the Seventies produced a glutted market,
and we were running stories about people with Ph.D.s in
physics who were unable to get jobs — who were driving
taxi cabs. Will you be surprised, or shocked, if I tell you I
have sat there on the city desk and watched editors and
reporters read those stories and throw back their heads
and laugh?
Over among the technologically un­
washed, science had lost its halo, and a tension was
building. It was already manifest in the arts. Very early in
this period there was a remake of Frankenstein, originally
written by Mary Shelley at about the time of the Luddite
uprisings. Dr. Frankenstein, mad with power, usurped
the prerogatives of the gods and accidentally unleashed
forces of evil too powerful to contain. One result was his
own death. That last part — about his own death — is an
eternal element of good drama. It is a rule on TV that the
bad guy has to get it in the neck before the final curtain
falls.
Well, at about the time that journalists were
laughing at out-of-work physicists, a Pennsylvania re­
search group was studying the growth of antiscience
12
 attitudes. One study showed that people who watched a
lot of television tended to be biased against science. A
follow-up focused on the mortality rates of the various
professional groups portrayed on television. It turned
out that TV scientists had the highest
fatality rate of any occupational group
Science is a on the airwaves, with fully 10 percent
of them dead before the closing cred­
muckrakers’
its. Even lawyers fared better. The
paradise, iike message is clear: Science, like crime,
shooting fish in doesn't pay. Or shouldn't.
a barrei. It's no different in the mov­
ies. Look, for instance, at ET. What
did the scientists want to do to this friendly little feller
from another world? Why...they wanted to cut him up,
of course. Vivisection, that was what was on their minds.
They were little better than butchers. The evil father in
Star Wars — what had happened to him? He had been
touched by science. Or take Jurassic Park. Who was the
villain there? These are all remakes of the Frankenstein
theme, and they play well in Peoria.
Journalism, meanwhile, was changing. It be­
came difficult and then impossible to get the time and
space that good science writing required. I had enough
clout to continue my own narrative work, at least for the
moment, but the pressure was for "harder" coverage —
investigative stories about science. Science writers who
were pugnacious toward science had an edge in assign­
ments and promotions. The gotcha story, so conspicu­
ously absent from science coverage, now arrived. Re­
ports surfaced about scientific malfeasance, misappro­
priation, and dishonesty. The dam breaker was the story
about the misuse of scientific overhead at Stanford. Later,
the Chicago Tribune did a major take-out on the contra­
dicting claims for the discovery of the AIDS virus. Very,
very dirty laundry.
Science was a sitting duck for this. Scientists
13
were accustomed to solicitous, if perhaps inaccurate, treat­
ment by the press. They had dealt with science writers.
Now there were science reporters on their trail, and that
was another thing entirely. It had never occurred to many
scientists that their grant requests, their reports, their
memos.. .this stuff is all public record. Science is a muck-
rakers' paradise, like shooting fish in a barrel, and I
predict that you are going to see a whole lot more of it in
the future.
All this provided cover for those who would use
the budget cutting mood as an excuse to take the knife to
science. Science budgets had once risen geometrically, but
in recent years they hadn't kept up with inflation —
especially if you figured in the rapidly rising costs of
regulation and administration. Many antiscience advo­
cates, among them animal rights and anti-nuclear groups,
have long advocated the use of regulation to suffocate
science. Each regulation seems harmless enough, and is
difficult to oppose, but together they can be deadly. This
had an impact, and a lot of sciences were hurting already.
Then came Congressman John Dingell and friends.
Science, as a community, might be
able to withstand the pressure. But science has
never been a community. When NASA was in trouble,
bench scientists lined up to take swipes at it. Climatolo­
gists despise particle physicists. Biologists — well, I actu­
ally lost one good source, a research physician, by object­
ing to his intemperate criticism of both NASA and the
supercollider. He got frosty and stayed that way. On the
other hand, it's extremely easy to find a physicist who will
serve on the board of a creationist group.
Scientists are all in this together, whether they
like it or not, but they don't know that yet, and I'm not
sure they're going to find out in time. What all this means
is that science's political childhood is over, and what is
true of science is doubly true for the science writer.
14
 INIot that science news is on the wane.
Broadly defined, it takes up an increasing percentage of
the news columns. A few days ago 1 read through my
local paper as a reality check, and it was full of science
news. Social science, space science, a story on salmon
ecology, another on medicine. Science is pervasive in our
civic life ... in our lives, generally. But a smaller and
smaller percentage of this science journalism is being
written by science writers, or even science reporters.
Much of it, as a result, is grossly inaccurate, if not in fact
then in tone, play, and context.
My scientist friends bitch a lot about this. I used
to tell them not to judge the whole profession by how it
covered science. Political coverage is much more in the
journalistic tradition. Journalism grew up with demo­
cratic politics, has even been called the fourth estate of
government. Many reporters have degrees in political
science. So they do a better job of politics, or at least they
used to. Today, with so much of politics tangled up in
science. I'm not sure that is true anymore.
As for me, I saw the handwriting on the wall but
thought I could be of some value educating the next
generation of science writers. In 19891 took a job as head
of the science journalism department at Oregon State
University. OSU is Oregon's premier science campus,
and its journalism department was the only undergradu­
ate science journalism department in the country. There
are several graduate institutions that teach science jour­
nalism, but most journalists do not have advanced de­
grees.
In any event, shortly after 1 arrived, the voters of
Oregon approved a tax-cutting measure that fell heavily
on higher education. OSU decided science journalism
was expendable. 1 knew the news industry wasn't going
to support the program, but I thought science might. The
critical player was OSU's dean of sciences. I went to him,
hat in hand. I'll never forget his response.
"That's your problem," he said. "We don't need
you."
I left the university, of course. Shortly thereafter
they closed down science journalism. It looked for a while
like they might also close the ballroom dance program.
But they found money to keep that. Also, that year, the
university undertook a multimillion dollar renovation of
its football stadium.
There comes a time in every professional
life when circumstances bring you to a pause, and a
reassessment. So 1 thought long and hard about what that
science dean said. 1 finally decided that there was no anger
there, and no arrogance. Just indifference. He was stating
what, to him, was a fact.
My own writing in the meanwhile was doing
quite well. I wasn't exactly getting rich, but I was writing
well and people liked what I was doing, and my own
future was being clarified. 1 no longer called myself a
science writer very often, because it seemed to put people
off. More and more of my thinking was about people, not
science — about human problems, and the courage or
cowardice or determination or whatever human beings
summon in response. So 1 pushed the science into the
background. Pretty soon 1 had de-emphasized science so
much that it almost wasn't there.
No, no. That's not right. It was very much there.
It was the fabric of the life in my stories, the scenery that
seeped into everything. In my work, as in our lives,
science had simply become a condition of existence.
By this time I was on the internet, and beginning
to realize its potential as a literary medium. I considered
moderating a listserver for science writers, but started one
for writers, instead. Several of us started assembling what
I think will be the foundations for a literary marketplace.
This is all wildly exciting, and relevant here mainly be­
cause it adds perspective to some of the other things I've
16
just said. My laments are not personal.
Meanwhile, though, 1 did the professional au­
topsy. It seemed necessary. I had invested many years
and a lot of creative energy in science writing. I'd thought
I'd done good work for a good cause, translating science.
I thought I was helping the two societies exist together in
the modern world. But, you know, when you cut a corpse
open and look at it piece by piece, there on the stainless
steel, it's difficult to be romantic.
I'll tell you why I was a science writer, and there
wasn't a drop of altruism in it. I like science. I like the
game. I like the idea that knowledge is a frontier, that
inquisitiveness is a force. I was enthralled by the revolu­
tion in neuroscience, and I followed it like some people
follow baseball. I got to dabble in everything. Once I was
at Kitt Peak, and got to bend over the lens container and
stare down into that beautiful, bottomless piece of per­
fectly ground glass that was the same color of the night
sky. I remember seeing my first autopsy, my first brain
operation. And hey! Any of you guys ever seen a manned
flight lift off, down at the Cape? The sound is what you
remember. It doesn't come through the television speak­
ers, it's too deep. You have to be there! It makes your bones
vibrate for hours afterwards. Did you know, I had a shot
at the short list to ride that thing! And I'll tell you some­
thing else: It was some of the best material a writer could
possibly ask for. It was like covering a major war and the
United Nations and the White House and a mass murder,
all at once, and with almost no competition.
So much for altruism. I didn't do it for science,
and I didn't do it for mankind. I did it for me, and it was
worth it.
Saying that gives me space to say the
other thing, which the moment requires. Because there
was a lot of power there, for a little while, being a science
writer — and if I wasn't serving any great altruistic
17
purpose, then what purpose was I serving? Journalistic
power only comes when you somehow engage history. So
what had I connected with? Once I asked the question the
answer came to me in a fairly straightforward fashion,
and I'll share it with you in a moment.
Meanwhile I also had the space to notice some
other things. Whatever I may have misunderstood or
glossed over in my science writing years, I had at least
gotten the C.P. Snow thing right. There were two societies,
as separate as oil and water. And the
larger one, the one that included most
of my family and friends and most On these great,
Americans, was in real trouble. The visceral, life-
culture was torn by factional strife. and-death
Millions were unemployed or em­
issues of the
ployed doing work that was neither
challenging or respected, and those day...the voice
who had decent jobs lived in moment- of the scientific
to-moment terror of losing them. In community was
frustration, they were lashing out at conspicuous in
everything intellectual. School budgets its absence.
were being cut, the core of our univer­
sities were being dismantled... it was as if the nonscientific
culture had decided that it did not need science, or math­
ematics, and of course from that perspective learning is all
the same, and so the animosity extended to history, litera­
ture, and the institutions of learning that harbored them.
This was old news, but as I rethought it I noticed
for the first time that something was missing. Where was
the clear, reasonable, intelligent voices of the best edu­
cated and most intelligent people I knew? Where were the
scientists? On these great, visceral, life-and-death issues
of the day, from the crisis in education to the crisis in
health care, the voice of the scientific community was
conspicuous in its absence. Sure, a scientist might do
Saturday in a soup kitchen, or support the local library, or
whatever. But these were offhand and largely risk-free
18
acts of individuals. When it came to taking important
stands, and articulating basic principles, the scientific
culture had pretty much taken a walk.
This realization was stunning. In our civic musings
we had worried endlessly about how a democracy could
function if the larger populace didn't care, or know enough
to vote, or whatever. That was one of the justifications for
journalistic privilege. But I had never heard anyone ask
what would happen if the best and the brightest of us
climbed up on an ivory tower and put their heads in a
cloud and told themselves they were above it all. Well, that
is apparently what happened. Our leaders, or at least the
people I think should lead, turned out to be a bunch of
political eunuchs.
Okay. I admit it is more complicated than that,
yes. But I have only an hour. Think about it.
I would like to say, also, that to the extent that I
describe reality, we have only ourselves to blame. There is
a deep anti-intellectualism in the American culture, and
our political system tends to reward it. In science, there has
always been a certain otherworldliness, a sense of self
containment and aloofness, and abandonment to a sterile
island might exquisitely suit the crime.
But those are asides. I came here to talk
about science writing, and in the bill of particulars I have
presented to you, we are there with the rest. We, the
science writers, were on duty, right at the epicenter, wit­
nesses to the whole affair. We should have seen its impli­
cations, but it was not in our interest to do so. We allowed
ourselves to be dazzled by the power of science, and we
forgot the power of art. We yammered on about bridging
the chasm between the cultures, and about translation.
We called ourselves writers, but we failed in our
artistic responsibility to look directly at the world and
articulate what we saw. We allowed someone else's defi­
nition to be imposed on us and our art.
19
"Science writer!" It had such a ring.
Like many others I didn't just acquiesce. I sought
it, achieved it, internalized it, wore it with pride. Mean­
while we all witlessly connived in putting a pretty face on
the ugly thing that was transpiring all around us.
Let me suggest to you that science writing, as it
appeared in the late Fifties and in the Sixties and is only
now waning, was not at all what it claimed to be, that it
was, rather, a part of a much broader, almost Freudian
psychosocial urge to keep science comfortably compart­
mentalized, out of the mainstream of life. The science
writer had a very unique, separate, ad hoc beat. By its very
existence it defined science as a weird appendage that had
attached itself to our culture...all these physicists and
chemists and psychoanatomists and the like.. .you know,
we can't live with 'em and we can't live without 'em. Gotta
have a specialist to just report on them.
The science writer was sup­
posed to be a translator, and it was The science
often phrased exactly that way. Well, writer was
one of the things translators do is make supposed to be
it unnecessary for us to learn the other
a translator, and
fellow's language. There is another
danger, as well, as those of you who it was often
have ever done any international ne­ phrased exactly
gotiating will know. The translator is that way.
always in great danger of becoming
the de facto negotiator. That is, he is apt to start putting a
spin on what Joe says, so as to prevent Sam from getting
mad, and then making similar corrections when Sam
answers back. First thing you know, all the differences
have been absorbed by the translator. The problem doesn't
show up until it comes time to actually do the deal, which
falls apart because each party agreed to different things.
I think we science writers did that. We softened
science's priestly image, concealed that aspect of its char­
acter that I call intelligent focus but others label arrogance.
20
 We helped carry science's political water, and in the
process of all this we became acolytes and enablers for a
society with a bad case of split personality. We helped it
avoid confronting the problem.
The two cultures, and I mean both of them, wanted
to have its cake and eat it too. The humanistic culture
wanted to embrace romanticism and do it on the internet,
while living thirty percent longer and
being eighty percent richer. The scien­
It is also time for tific culture wanted to continue telling
itself it was above the fray and apohti-
people to come
cal, and that it was doing what it was
to terms with the
doing for love of knowledge — that it
fact that the
was a priesthood, in short, but without
worid os we priestly duties or responsibilities.
know it...exists Well, I quit. We can't have it
only because of both ways. Either we are going to live
science and in the Enlightenment or we are not. We
can be Voltaire or we can be Rousseau
technology.
but we cannot be both. At least we
cannot be both and survive without constructing some
very rational psychosocial firewalls.
I speak to you now not as a science writer but as
a writer. It is my artistic observation that my civilization is
on the brink of a great decision about itself, and that it is
high time to dispense with translators. It is time for scien­
tists to come to terms with the fact that they're eating at the
political trough and that they had damned well better
make their political case, and make it in a way that real
people can understand it. It is also time for people to come
to terms with the fact that the world as we know it, as a
haven for couch potatoes and new agers and critical
humanists, exists only because of science and technology,
and was created at great cost not only in money but in
individual effort, labor and, yes, faith. For empirically
science is not a substitute for faith, it is a faith, it is a church,
no less real for its austerity, and that is the other thing we
21
have to deal with. Rather, you do. I don't.
An artist's place, a writer's place, is different. My
generation has been very sterile, artistically, and I have
touched on some of the causes, but it bears mention here
that some of the best writing of our day focuses on the
subject of science. I might mention, sort of offhand, Tom
Wolfe's The Right Stuff and any number of pieces by John
McPhee. But we don't call them science writers, do we? No,
we don't, any more than we would call Hemingway a war
writer, or Steinbeck a poverty writer, or Mark Twain a
children's writer.
Writers by their nature deal with the central tur­
moil of the human condition — that is to say, the human
enigma. This enigma is something like the influenza virus,
in that as soon as you think you've identified it, it changes
its shape. It becomes something that has never before been
seen in its present form but which, once you figure it out,
is heavily foreshadowed by history. To switch metaphors,
this is the stuff of Greek tragedy. We are all Oedipus. Each
of us stands before the sphinx and is given a new riddle.
If I mistook myself for a science writer, which is to
say a specialty writer, well — that was a measure of my
own innocence and self doubt, which was no less than
anyone else's. It was an easy enough mistake to make, for
any of us to make. Being a science writer, like being a
scientist, seemed like a nice, pleasant, well-defined niche.
But it was no such thing. For we were born into a moment
in which the chief problem besetting our kind was the
conflict between the two cultures — between ourselves
and ourselves, between what we felt we knew and what
we thought we felt.
If science was ever a thing apart, a special way of
living and of seeing things, that time is past. Today, science
is the vital principle of our civilization. To do science is
critical, to defend it the kernel of political realism. To
define it in words is to be, quite simply, a writer, working
the historical mainstream of literature.
22
Previous Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures are available Published by:,
in booklet form. For a copy, contact the School of School of Journalism
Journalism, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. College of Communications
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
1989 ♦ John Noble Wilford
"Science as Exploration"
Serial editor:
1991 ^ Dorthy Nelkin Mark Littmann, Professor
"Risk Communication and the Mass Media" Chair of Excellence in Science,
Technology, and Medical Writing
1993 ♦ Gina Kolata
"Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies" Serial Designer:
Lee Scurry, Graduate Assistant
1994 ♦ Victor Cohn
"Reporting—Good and Bad—on Health in America" "The End of Science Writing"
© 1997 Jon Franklin
1995 ♦ Jim Detjen Publication Authorization Number
"Environmental News: Where Is It Going?" ROl-2910-57-001-97

1997 ♦ Jon Franklin

"The End of Science Writing"
Robert Kanigel

The Perils
of

Science

Seventh
Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media

April 7,1999

School of Journalism
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
 ROBERT KANIGEL

The American Society of Journalists and Authors named Robert Kanigel

The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on
science, society, and the mass media was established in 1989
by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.
its 1998 Author of the Year; he had twice previously won the Society’s
Outstanding Article Award, in 1989 and again in 1992. Mr. Kanigel has
written extensively across the spectrum of
science, literature, and religion. Among his
many other honors is the American Chemical
Society's Grady-Stack Award for Interpreting
Chemistry for the Public. He was a finalist
for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in

In addition to his more than 400 articles,
1949, seven years after the government established Oak Ridge
to house workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak Ridger
essays, and reviews for leading newspapers
was the first successful privately owned newspaper in the city and magazines, Mr. Kanigel is the author of
and marked an important stage in the transition of Oak Ridge four books: The One Best Way: Frederick
from federal operation to private ownership and self- Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency,
government. 1997; The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of
the Genius Ramanujan, 1991; Apprentice to
Published by Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty,
School of Journalism 1986; and Vintage Reading: Erom Plato to
College of Communications Bradbury, a Personal Tour of Some of the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville World’s Best Books, 1998. He is working on
a popular history of tourism set in Nice,
Serial editor: Mark Littmann
France.
Professor, Chair of Excellence
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing
Critical acclaim for Mr. Kanigel’s writing and his experience as a writing

Serial design consultant: Robert Heller teacher at the University of Baltimore and Johns Hopkins University led
Associate Professor in 1999 to a professorship for him in Writing and Humanistic Studies at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Serial designer: Stephanie Mowery
Graduate Assistant Professor Kanigel was born in Brooklyn in 1946, attended Stuyvesant
High School, and graduated in 1966 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
“The Perils of Popularizing Science”
with a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked as an engineer for
© 1999 Robert Kanigel
three years before launching a full-time career as a writer.
Publication Authorization Number
R01-2910-57-001-00
He and his wife Judith and son David now live in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.

N A New Yorker cartoon a few years
I back, two elder scientists, evidently in
the autumn of their careers, reminisce
about old times. “One thing I’ll say for us,
Meyer,” says one to the other, “we never
stooped to popularizing science.”
Maybe I chuckled when I saw that
cartoon, maybe I didn’t. But by then I was
no longer surprised, as I had been years
before, when scientists used the word
“popularize” as something like an obscenity.
As a writer of popular magazine
articles and books about science — as a
popularizer — I’d all along fancied I was
doing something worthwhile: You take a
reader weary of political scandal, mindless
commercials, and maybe a rotten job, and
lead him into a world of brilliant men and
women doing important work at the edge of
human knowledge. This was what I did for
a living. This was my metier. And worthy
endeavor I thought it was.
So I felt a little the way a comparably
scorned prostitute might when, belatedly, I
realized that many scientists viewed my work
quite otherwise: Meyer’s cartoon colleague,
after all, takes deep satisfaction in never
having “stooped” to it!
Science popularization covers a
broad territory — from news items in the
paper and on TV, to long magazine articles,
to books aimed at a general readership. But
the common ground is that, as writer, you
make hard work easy. Of course, the hard
work you make easier is that of the reader;
achieving that means brutally hard work on
your part.
I feel I’m popularizing whenever the
subject of the writing is itself difficult —
when it’s intellectually challenging
or otherwise erects barriers to
comprehension. And in this Making the complex
respect we’re not limited to science simple and the
and technology, though they’re the obscure familiar is
readiest sources in our culture for
intellectually daunting material. what I mean by
But consider music theory, law, popularization.
health policy, intellectual history,
literary theory, philosophy — all
these and many other fields, none
of them “science,” nonetheless present most
of the same problems: they deal with difficult
ideas on which readers are apt to gag unless
those ideas are presented in palatable form.
Doing just that — making the complex
simple and the obscure familiar — is what I
mean by popularization.
Within this broad range, consider a
whole spectrum of popularized treatments.
You could write about a would-be miracle
drug for the National Enquirer. Or for the New
York Times. Or, conceivably, for the old
2
 Mosaic magazine—which among these three
is probably the only one you haven’t heard
of. Until a few years ago, Mosaic was
published by the National Science
Foundation. If the National Enquirer
represents the outer limit of science
popularization, where there’s almost nothing
left of intellectual substance or nuance.
Mosaic might be thought to represent a kind
of inner limit.
Who read Mo5a/c? Scientists. Smart,
hard-driving scientists with Ph.D.s, and big
labs, and ambitious research agendas. Why
include it within the precincts of
popularization? Because the
scientists who read it were reading
To popularize means
outside their own fields. Mosaic
never writing from was for particle theorists reading
one insider to about genetics. For parasitologists
with no more knowledge of
another.
number theory than, well, the
average reader of the National
Enquirer.
I wrote a couple of articles for Mosaic
— one, I recall, was on links between the
immune system and the nervous system —
and they were among the most challenging I
ever did. To a reader of the National Enquirer,
or maybe even the New York Times, neither
might seem particularly “popular. ’’ And yet,
writing them demanded many of the same
skills and sensibilities I’d use to write on the
same subject for the other two publications:
They demanded that I step out of the world
3
of the expert, and move to the mind of a
reader presumed largely ignorant of what
that expert knows.
Here, then, is the essential step, the
one that makes popularizing what it is, and
makes it so difficult: It’s the change of frame.
It’s seeing a subject — and again, it could
just as well be chess, or choreography — not
through the eyes of neuroscientist,
chessmaster, or choreographer, but through
the sometimes vacant eyes of the rest of us.
To popularize means never writing
from one insider to another. The fact that
information may be new to a group of
readers is not the deciding element: If they
share a deep common base of knowledge, a
common frame, then there’s little or no
context to establish. That’s not
popularization.
Neither is writing for readers who,
while they may have little specialized
knowledge of the subject, need to learn it.
As popularizer, you don’t teach your reader
to analyze a heart monitor trace, navigate
through a piece of software, or pass an exam.
Your reader has no motivation save normal
human curiosity. She reads your article or
book today, takes from it what she can, then
goes back to her life.
What, then, are the perils of
popularizing science? What can go wrong
in trying to take something complex and
nuanced, perhaps something at the very edge
 of the writer’s own understanding, and
render it easy to take?
In a word, everything.
The most obvious thing that can go
wrong — and yet for this reason, the least
interesting — is that you just bollix things
up, make dumb mistakes: It’s not adenine
that’s one of the four nucleotide bases in
DNA, you write, but, uh, aspirin. Some
magazines have fact checkers to help catch
bloopers like that, but it should never get that
far; it’s the writer’s responsibility.
A more serious problem is that in
distilling out the essence, in sieving out
needless or distracting detail, you leave out
crucial details, and so give a fundamentally
wrong impression. If a scientist’s conclusion
is surrounded by half a dozen ifi, ands, and
huts, to omit them all is to distort.
Another problem is that in
simplifying, you make it simplistic. DNA,
the reader “learns,” is a sort of curlicue
molecule that makes your eyes blue or green.
While not in every way wrong, what you’ve
written is weightless. You leave the reader
to grumble, “So what?” or “Oh, I knew all
that,” or “There’s nothing new here.”
Or else you can go the other way,
failing to sufficiently boil down difficult
material; here the reader laments, “I still
don’t get it.” You’re all over the place with
hydrogen bonds and ionization constants and
calcium channels. Maybe the scientists you
interviewed give you points for not making
a mess of things. But those points don’t
count, because your reader, who hasn’t been
near a classroom in twenty years, comes
away hopelessly lost. Make no mistake,
you’ve let your reader down.
Finally, you neither get the facts
wrong, nor leave a seriously wrong
impression, nor go too far, nor fail
to go far enough, but somehow, oh
If a scientist’s
so subtly, skew it wrong: Does the
new, much-vaunted AIDS conclusion is
treatment have serious problems surrounded by half a
but nonetheless give cause for
dozen ifs^ ands^ and
hope? Or does the new AIDS
treatment, looked to with much buts^ to omit all the
hope, have serious problems? qualifications is to
What’s the right shading to give it?
distort.
Is there a “right” shading?
These are real perils with
serious consequences: Readers
misinformed. Excitement about a
breakthrough drug that isn’t. Thousands
cruelly disappointed. People going about
their daily lives feeling stupid and
incompetent. A scientist hurt because his
contribution wasn’t fully recognized. Your
reputation as a writer soiled.
And these are real perils in another
way — perils twice over — because they’re
so commonly encountered. Immunology
really is difficult. And even aside from the
difficulty of the science itself, just teasing
apart who contributed what to a scientific
discovery, who got what insight and how.
6
 even just what happened first, is not so easy
to establish as it might seem.
On the eve of the American
Revolution a man named Simon Winship
lived in Lexington, in the old Massachusetts
Bay Colony. When they asked him about it
later, he swore the redcoats fired first. But
William Sutherland, a British
What many see as officer, said the rebels opened fire
first — that it was their attack that
science and provoked the British response that
technology’s black- killed eight colonial militiamen.
Who really fired “the shot
and-white world of
heard round the world,” sparking
hard data and the American Revolution? No one
established fact, the knows. These statements were
lesson went, is as among more than a dozen first­
hand accounts of that April
mired in murky gray morning coming down to us today.
as any other. Together they’ve been described as
“scanty, conflicting, contradictory,
and incomplete.” Which is why,
some years ago, a Vassar College class
studied them.
And the course in which they studied
them? American History 101? A graduate
course in historiography? No, it was a course
called “Introduction to Scientific Inquiry,”
part of an Alfred R Sloan Foundation-
sponsored program to bring science and
technology to liberal arts classrooms.
Students analyzed seemingly contradictory
reports in a medical journal on the risks of
estrogen. They read popular accounts of
scientific research, comparing them with the
journal articles in which they’d first
appeared.
And they studied what happened that
day on Lexington Green. Because, while
removed from science, this case study
showed how even evidence as seemingly
straightforward as eyewitness testimony can
wallow in ambiguity. Just as scientific
evidence can. What many see as science and
technology’s black-and-white world of hard
data and established fact, the lesson went, is
as mired in murky gray as any other.
Who among the eyewitnesses on
Lexington Green “got it right”? To this day,
we don’t know.
Who among the many accounts of
cold fusion got it right? It now seems clear
that the researchers themselves didn’t.
Recently, I wrote a long article about
the development of a vaccine against Lyme
disease. But my piece was also about the risks
the scientists took in pursuing their ideas, the
mistakes they made, their doubts, how they
came to understand how their vaccine
worked. An important part of my story was
the gentlemanly competition between two
groups of researchers, from Harvard and
from Yale.
I like to think there wasn’t a single
factual error in my piece. But did I truly “get
it right”? How large a role did that friendly
rivalry play? A little? A lot? How give it its
proper weight?
The fact is, you always get it a little
wrong. How many who have read Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or watched it
performed, take away from it the same
insights? How many remember the same bits
of dialogue?
Ambiguity intrudes whenever you
translate the real world onto the printed page,
and intrudes all the more as that page plays
out in the minds of the reader. Even when
the printed page is a peer-reviewed article in
a distinguished scientific journal, something
will be lost. Scientists themselves, I think,
realize that a printed journal article only
loosely represents the experimental work,
leaving out as much as it includes.
So those who worry about the work
of science popularizers have reason to worry.
Representing the intellectually daunting
work of science is easy to mess up. Dare we
leave the job, one might reasonably ask, to a
mere writer?
Every writer, then, and every editor,
and every educator of science writers and
editors, owes his or her best efforts to
surmounting these difficulties. Yes, learn the
science well. Listen carefully. Scrupulously
check your facts. The perils are great and
the standards set by stern critics of science
popularizing justify all the intelligence and
care you can bring to the job . . .
But.
But, I wish to say, merely to satisfy
such concerns is to set the bar too low; a
higher standard properly applies, one beyond
issues of accuracy and balance.
It is never enough, I would argue, that
the reader should, by hard work, be able to
understand what you have written. He’s got
to feel moved to understand it.
Put another way, there must always
be an emotional component in
science popularization; and the Ambiguity intrudes
ultimate peril is leaving it out. Any
work of science writing — however whenever you
clear, accurate, and balanced — translate the real
that fails to engage the reader world onto the
emotionally is, at some level,
science writing that has failed. printed page, and
intrudes all the
It’s natural, I suppose, to more as that page
assume that popularizing science
means taking something away from plays out in the
it. But I wish to suggest that the minds of the reader.
science popularizer adds
something, too — something not
residing in equations, or charts, or the arcane
terminology of the journal article, or the
formal conference presentation.
I once wrote a biography of the
Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.
But The Man Who Knew Infinity is really a
dual biography, its second subject being G.
H. Hardy, the English mathematician who
discovered Ramanujan, brought him to
England on the eve of World War I, and
fruitfully collaborated with him for five years.
10
 Now Hardy, as it happens, was a
gifted writer. Speculating about what career
he might have chosen other than
mathematics, he wrote that “Journalism is
the only profession, outside academic life, in
which I should have felt really confident of
my chances.” Indeed, his Mathematicians
Apology is a classic.
Hardy applied his gifts even to his
most densely mathematical papers. In
collaborations, it was invariably he who
wrote up the joint paper and shepherded it
through publication. “He supplied the gas,”
recalled one of his collaborators, J. E.
Littlewood. Littlewood was content if what
he had to say was correct. Hardy wanted
more.
The “gas,” as he once defined it, was
the “rhetorical flourishes,” the equivalent of
“pictures on the board in the lecture, devices
to stimulate the imagination of pupils.” A
reviewer said of one of his mathematical
texts — one of his advanced texts, mind you,
aimed solely at mathematics students — that
Hardy had “shown in this book and
elsewhere a power of being interesting which
is to my mind unequaled.”
It is this “gas,” this species of
emptiness, that Hardy supplied. And so does
a good science popularizes But it is not
empty. And it does not water science down.
It juices science up.
Addition, not subtraction.
Not long ago, a Stanford University
historian, Richard White, wrote of his
experiences as adviser to a number of
popular PBS documentaries on historical
subjects. Sometimes, he reported, he’d
grown irritated with their little distortions,
with gray yielding to black and white, with
historical sophistication slipping away.
Always there was the director’s stock reply:
“The camera loves a story,” especially a clear,
simple, familiar one.
Documentary makers, of course, are
history’s popularizers; White and his fellow
scholars challenged them frequently. But, to
his surprise, the filmmakers challenged him,
too. “Precisely because many filmmakers do
not usually think like historians,” he wrote,
“they have forced me, as an adviser, to think
about how historians do think.”
Historians rely on what White
pictured as “dead things — documents,
artifacts” — and hold human memory in
disdain because, as White wrote, it
“rearranges the past to make sense of the
present. It is as much about who we are now
as who we were then.” And that, to
historians, made it too loosely tethered to be
much trusted.
But White found himself coming
away with a broader view, one more
sympathetic to the role of myth and memory
in understanding the past. Before working
with the filmmakers, he’d felt that traditional
“history represented our only valid use of
the past... I no longer think it is the only
 legitimate way.”
The filmmakers, the popularizers of
his discipline, were not ruining or distorting
a one true way of viewing the past. They
were bringing to it another way.
Addition, not subtraction.
The same goes for
I write articles and popularizers of science. Yes, the
books which, if they vision of the natural world they
cannot be dignified impart is inevitably less rigorous
and nuanced than that splayed out
as art, at least for inspection in journal articles
confer on my reader and at scientific conferences;
an intellectual, popularized treatments do,
inevitably, lose something. But
emotional, or they gain something, too.
sensual experience. They gain sensuous detail.
They gain human context. They
gain feeling.
Many science writers view
themselves as educators or teachers. I do not,
and to explain I must turn once more to G.
H. Hardy, the mathematician who supplied
“gas” to his mathematical papers.
Hardy was a number theorist, a pure
mathematician. He’d get annoyed when
people said how mathematics was important
because, after all, it was useful. “I have never
done anything ‘useful,’” wrote Hardy. “No
discovery of mine has made or is likely to
make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill,
the least difference to the amenity of the
world.” That mathematics might aid in the
13
design of bridges or enhance the material
comfort of millions, he wrote, was to say
nothing in its defense. He pitied physicists
who used mathematical tools to understand
the workings of the universe. As for real
mathematics, pure mathematics, it “must be
justified as art,” Hardy wrote, “if it can be
justified at aU.”
Hardy’s was a cult of uselessness, one
for which I confess some sympathy. Deep
down, I care little if my reader comes away
better able to function in the world of science
and technology about which I write. Rather,
I write articles and books which, if they
cannot be dignified as art, at least confer on
my reader an intellectual, emotional, or
sensual experience. I try to leave my reader
with a heightened few moments which might
have something in common with those
produced by viewing art or listening to music.
I fail more often than I succeed, but I try.
But while I don’t write in order to
teach, this is not to say that readers of my
articles and books do not learn; I think they
probably do. I don’t set out to teach my
reader about Lyme disease, or machine tools,
or prime numbers. But some of them wiU, I
suspect, learn a little about them along the
way.
And they will learn more, my deepest
prejudice holds, by virtue of that emotional
component — the sense of movement,
drama, excitement, and surprise that flows
over them as they read.
 I learn more when feeling quickens
thought. I think most of us do.
Yes, sometimes we must memorize
the organelles of a cell, say, or calculus
integration formulas. But don’t we learn
more, and better, when sustained by the
waters of some deep emotional spring?
By an inspiring teacher whose every
gesture conveys commitment, enthusiasm,
and feeling?
By the expectations of a parent?
By the hope of again experiencing
that flash of insight when we finally get it?
By the grandly adolescent conviction
that we’re on our way to a Nobel Prize or a
cure for cancer?
By the hope that we’ll beat out
someone else to the answer — and that if
we do, we’ll get the girl, or the boy?
By the satisfaction of solving a
puzzle, almost regardless of its content?
By the sheer delight of watching what
had been say, a complex, unnavigable
network of biological pathways at last snap
into focus?
By the pleasure — intellectual,
aesthetic, and spiritual all at once — that
wells up in some of us at, say, contemplating
the structure, in all its sublime beauty, of
DNA: the double helix, the beautiful
economy of the four bases, the genetic code,
the way heredity lies embedded within its
very structure. This counts, too.
I’m being hopelessly sloppy here.
These examples of “emotional sources”
cover enormous territory, from the noble to
the base. And yet they are united in this one
respect: they inhabit the realm of feelings.
It is this broad landscape that, I
believe, good science popularization always
mines.
I’d go so far as to say — call it the
radical version of my argument —
that all understanding not in some
way infused with feeling is All understanding
incomplete. not in some way
infused with feeling
My first book was called
Apprentice to Genius: The Making of is incomplete.
a Scientific Dynasty, a book about
mentor relationships among elite
scientists. This dynasty had its roots among
a handful of scientists in the 1930s and 1940s,
and its impact is felt today in
pharmacological research labs around the
world.
While researching this book I
interviewed dozens of scientists. I learned
that, far from cool and heady, their
relationships with their mentors were deeply
personal ones that burned with intensity.
Indeed, I experienced something so often in
interviewing them that it became almost
predictable: I had but to broach the name of
the person who had molded him or her as a
scientist and any cold recital of facts would
cease. The voice would soften, or quicken,
or rise to anger, or otherwise fill with feeling.
16
One’s mentor, I found, was rarely a neutral that critics of popularization want us to
subject. impart?
In my interviews, I focused mostly on By the stern standards established by
their relationships with their mentors. But a just-the-facts-ma’am paper delivered at a
often they told me how they had been scientific conference, this falls far, far short.
seduced by science in the first place. And It is idealized, semi-fictionalized,
for many of them, their interest had first romanticized, bastardized, insufficiently
quickened under the influence of a gifted substantive, hopelessly imprecise. This is
writer. Many had read Arrowsmith, by science popularization, one might cringe,
Sinclair Lewis. Others, Microbe Hunters, by way over at the extreme. Some might say, at
Paul de Kruif, one of the earliest true science its worst.
popularizers. But it seduced, and inspired, the
Now do the works of Lewis and de budding scientists of its day.
Kruif give a truly accurate sense of the work We need more of it, not less.
of science? “Two hundred and fifty years
ago,” de Kruif writes, “an obscure man
named Leeuwenhoek looked for the first time
into a mysterious new world peopled with a
thousand different kinds of tiny beings, some
ferocious and deadly, others friendly and
useful, many of them more important to
mankind than any continent or archipelago.”
Tiny beings.
Ferocious and deadly.
Continent or archipelago.
Such stage-lit prose grew out of the
author’s wish to illuminate dramatically a
terrain that might otherwise be mistaken for
being stark, alien, and gray. He knew it was
not. But when he writes about
microorganisms as “wee beasts” and “little
animals,” or portrays Pasteur as an arrogant
showman, impossibly rash and sloppy, is he
conveying the kind of scientific substance
Previous Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures are available in booklet
form. For a copy, contact the School of Journalism, University
of Tennessee, Knoxville.

1989 John Noble Wilford

“Science as Exploration"

1991 DorthyNelkin
"Risk Communication and the Mass Media”

1993 Gina Kolata

“Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies”

1994 Victor Cohn

“Reporting-Good and Bad-on Health in America”

1995 Jim Detjen

“Environmental News: Where Is It Going?”

1997 Jon Franklin

“The End of Science Writing”

1999 Robert Kanigel

“The Perils of Popularizing Science”
Science Journalism
Across Two
Centuries
John Noble Wilford

Eighth
Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and
the Mass Media

February 28, 2000

School of Journalism
University of Tennessee
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science,
society, and the mass media was established in 1989 by
Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Science Journalism
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.
Across Two Centuries
Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949,
seven years after the government established Oak Ridge
to house workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak
Ridger was the first successful privately owned newspaper by
in the city and marked an important stage in the transition John Noble Wilford
of Oak Ridge from federal operation to private ownership
Pulitzer Prize-winning Science
and self-government.
Correspondent and Senior Writer of
The New York Times

Published by
School of Journalism
College of Communications
University of Tennessee
Eighth
Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
Serial editor; Mark Littmann
on Science, Society, and
Professor, Chair of Excellence
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing the Mass Media

Serial design Robert Heller

consultant: Associate Professor
February 28, 2000
Serial designer: Jeff Garstka
Graduate Assistant

Journalism Across Two Centuries School of Journalism

© 2000 John Noble Wilford University of Tennessee
Publication Authorization Number ROl'2910'001'01
 John Noble Wilford

The name John Noble Wilford has been

synonymous with outstanding science coverage by
The New York Times since 1965 when The Times
lured him away from Time magazine, which
snatched him from The Wall Street Journal, which
grabbed him fresh from his bachelor of science
degree in journalism at the University of Tennes­
see and his master of arts degree in political sci­
ence from Syracuse University.
At The
New York Times,
Mr. Wilford is
Science Corre­
spondent and
Senior Writer.
In his 35 years at
The New York
Times he has
been Science
News Reporter
(covering the
Apollo Moon
project) 1965-
1973; Assistant
National News
Editor 1973-1975; and Director of Science News
1975-1979, during which he launched the Science
Times weekly section. He received two Pulitzer
Prizes for National Reporting: the first in 1984 for
his articles on space science and planetary explo­
ration; the second in 1987 for his and his col­
leagues’ coverage of the Space Shuttle Challenger
accident investigation. He also won the AAAS/
Westinghouse Science Journalism Award (1983)
and the National Space Club Press Award (1974).
He was a finalist to be NASA’s Journalist in Space
on a space shuttle mission before the project was
postponed indefinitely.
Mr. Wilford is the author or coauthor of
eight highly acclaimed books including We Reach
the Moon (1969), The Mapmakers (1981), The Neiv
York Times Guide to the Return of Halley's Comet
(1985), The Riddle of the Dinosaur (1985), Mars
Beckons (1990), and The Mysterious History of
Columbus (1992). When benefactors and the State
of Tennessee enabled the UT School of Journal­
ism to establish its endowed Chair of Excellence
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing,
John Noble Wilford was appointed the first holder,
1989-1990, and he delivered the first Hill Lec­
ture in 1989. The University of Tennessee made
Mr. Wilford a charter inductee in its Alumni Aca­
demic Hall of Fame. A plaque honoring him hangs
in the Hodges Library.
Mr. Wilford and his wife Nancy have one
daughter, Nona. □
Your invitation to deliver the Hill Lec­
ture stimulated me to take a long pause and
reflect on what it is that 1 do for a living. 1
guess we journalists have some obligation to
explain what we do, because people tend to
have strong, often uncomplimentary feelings
about us. As I thought about my work, 1 real­
ized how much science journalism — all jour­
nalism — has undergone thoroughgoing
change, all in the course of my career.
We are in the midst of what some are
calling the Information Age. New technolo­
gies are transforming everything about com­
munications: the volume and immediacy of
news, the scope and modes of transmission,
the influence of news and those who commu­
nicate it, the blurring of old distinctions be­
tween print and electronic journalism.
In short, we have come a long, long
way from the typewriter and desk-bound tele­
phone, the linotype and vacuum-tube radios,
or the flickering test patterns on early televi­
sion that used to mesmerize us. And no one
today would think of shouting “Boy!” across
the city room to command the presence of
someone to carry your copy to the editors. Two
reasons for this: now your story is transmitted
 II broke out. In retrospect, I think I owe my
to the desk electronically, and the young
continuing and mounting interest in becom­
people in the newsroom are no longer copy
ing a journalist to Hitler and my Grandfather.
boys. They are now called something like news
My father’s father came to live with us about
assistants and many of them are women, who
that time, and he was going blind. He kept
would not take kindly to shouts of “Girl!”
the radio on most of the day and evening.
Through the war I listened with him to Presi­
Please indulge me in some personal his­
dent Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and news from
tory to illustrate how journalism, especially
the fronts. I heard the names of people and
science journalism, has changed in my life­
foreign places, which primed me for reading
time.
the paper the next day with more excitement
Growing up, 1 never aspired to a ca­
and comprehension than would normally be
reer as a science journalist—such a career
the case for a boy my age. It also opened my It also opened my
hardly existed then. Yet it seems that at birth
mind to a big world out there, and surely jour­ mind to a big
1 must have been hard-wired to be some kind
nalists were among its most interesting and world out there,
of journalist. How else to explain why at the
important inhabitants. and surely
age of five 1 started producing my own news­
Nothing in the years ahead altered my journalists were
paper—presumptuously starting at the top, as
ambition. In pursuit of a career in journalism among its most
editor and publisher. (1 have been descend­
I worked on school newspapers, came to the interesting and
ing the corporate ladder ever since.)
University of Tennessee and majored in jour­ important
We were living then in Fulton, Ken­
nalism and happily served apprenticeships on inhabitants.
tucky. In the morning came the Memphis pa­
a hometown paper in Paris, Tennessee, and
per, The Commercial Appeal; in the late after­
for two summers on The Commercial Appeal. I
noon, the Fulton Daily Leader. 1 preferred the
did the usual apprentice things: wrote obitu­
Daily Leader. At only eight pages, usually, it
aries, covered accidents and riverboat fires,
seemed more manageable, and its columnist
took in civic club speeches, phoned rewrite
sometimes wrote about me and my nextdoor
from the neighborhood of a murder victim (my
friend, Jim. In any event, 1 modeled my own
one and only murder story), interviewed a few
paper after the Daily Leader. 1 laid out three
politicians (most famously. Senator Albert
columns on a piece of typing paper, copied a
Gore Sr.). And late on a quiet Saturday night,
headline or two and the weather report from
I hung on every word as the old hands talked
the real newspaper and drew a few stick fig­
about their stories and groused about the
ures to suggest photographs. It was a start.
manifest deficiencies of editors. Some things
1 entered first grade in 1939, in the
never change.
month Hitler invaded Poland and World War
 After college and a master’s degree in
political science, I went to work in New York
for The Wall Street Journal. My ambition was
to be a political reporter in Washington or
perhaps a foreign correspondent. Then, as ex­
pected, the Army requested my services and I
spent most of my two years in Germany. Dur­
ing that time, in October 1957, Sputnik was
launched, the first artificial satellite. All of a
sudden, the country was deeply anxious about
the vigor of its science and technology in re­
lation to the Soviet Union. Editors who had
never given science a second thought were
asking for more science stories and assigning
more reporters to the beat.
Soon after I returned to The Journal,
the managing editor asked me if 1 would like
to try writing some medical stories as part of
an expanded science staff. Though my back­
ground was limited to the bare minimum of
college science courses, writing about medi­
cine seemed worth a try; it sounded more in­
teresting than covering corporation annual
meetings and trade shows.
I came to enjoy the experience of al­
ways learning something new and translating
it to the general public. Later, as a writer at
Time magazine, I shifted from medicine to sci­
ence. After writing a few cover stories on the
emergence of computers and then on various
missions of space exploration, I abandoned
any residual notions of becoming a political
reporter and plunged wholeheartedly into be­
ing a science reporter.
Fate had taken a hand, and I eagerly re­
sponded. The same romantic spirit that
trobbed in me at the sound of those wartime
radio reports surfaced again. Here was my
chance to be in on big things and one of the
biggest stories of my time — flying to the
Moon and explorations of the solar system,
and discoveries about human and cosmic ori­
gins. Here was my opportunity to make a dif­
ference, perhaps, and have a good time doing
it. If nothing else, I should at least learn a lot
more than I might going around and listen­
ing to the usual run of politicians.
It was a propitious time to be cover­
ing science. Both science and science jour­
nalism were growth fields. And nearly all of
us were reporters who were learning science
on the job. We were retrofitted science jour­ Every month
seemed to bring
nalists.
new discoveries
Before World War ll, only a handful
of journalists in this country specialized in ofantibiotics and
reporting news of science, medicine, and tech­ vaccines, new
nology. Our numbers are still relatively small: surgical
maybe a thousand fulltime science journalists techniques,
and perhaps an equal number of others who advances in
serve science institutions in communicating aviation and
research news. nuclear energy,
The spread of science journalism, even more menacing
intercontinental
before Sputnik, reflected the rise in research
during and after the war. Every month seemed missiles, and
to bring new discoveries of antibiotics and greater insights
into the nature
vaccines, new surgical techniques, advances
of matter.
in aviation and nuclear energy, more menac-
ing intercontinental missiles, and greater in­
sights into the nature of matter.
The Sputnik influence then became
strong. 1 cannot count the times an editor re­
sponded to one of my story proposals with an
impatient question: “Yes, yes, but does this put
us ahead of the Russians?”
A fair question under the circum­
stances. After all, implicitly or explicitly, sci­
ence was selling itself as an agent of prosper­
ity and security, and had been since the war,
and on those terms, the public had been gen­
erous with its dollars.
Beginning in the ‘70s, our reporting
of science became more sophisticated than it
had been when 1 started out. Earlier, report­
ing tended to celebrate the wonders and
miracles of medicine and science. Then, as
everyone became more conscious of the vul­
nerabilities of our environment, science jour­
nalism lost some of its innocence and began
to pay more attention to the unwanted effects
of technology. We began writing with a more
critical eye about all of science. We sought to
weigh risks against benefits.
About this time, also, younger report­
ers entering our field were much better pre­
pared, many of them having advanced degrees
in science or medicine. If 1 were starting out
today, 1 probably couldn’t get a job on The
Times science staff.
1 choose to think that another major
transition in science journalism began in No­
vember 1978. That was when The New York
Times started its weekly section. Science
Times. As the head of The Times science staff
at the time, I confess to being prejudiced.
But a case can be made that Science
Times was a significant step in communicat­
ing the work of science to the larger public,
and to other scientists. Here was an influen­
tial paper devoting several pages every Tues­
day to developments in science and medicine.
It was making a statement that science should
be part of the well-informed person’s regular
reading diet. It was also saying to fellow jour­
nalists everywhere that science is news and
the responsible way to cover such a subject is
to move beyond piecemeal reporting to more
comprehensive articles that place new re­
search in its broader context. In longer and
more reflective articles, we try to correct one
of journalism’s weaknesses — the breathless,
oversimplified accounts of events.
Even so, tensions and misunderstand­ Tensions and
ings seem inevitable in the relationship be­ misunderstandings
tween journalism and science. Someone once seem inevitable
said. Scientists and journalists have a lot in in the relation­
common in the search for knowledge and ship between
nothing in common when it comes to report­ journalism and
ing results. science.
Scientists, for example, proceed step
by step and see their discoveries as only an
incremental part of a larger undertaking. The
responsible scientists eschew the kind of
sweeping claims for their results that head­
line writers live for.
 Journalists, on the other hand, are an
impatient lot. We contend that if we wait for
every conceivable piece of a research puzzle
to fall in place, the story will never be told, or
a competitor will tell it first. Time is of the
essence in journalism, and always will be.
When we learn of something happening in
science, we often have only a few hours, at
most a few days, to inform ourselves through
interviews and reading and then to write a
piece translating what we have learned into
the popular language. We do our best, though
we are bound sometimes to overlook nuances,
caveats, or contrary interpretations.
Another severe limitation to our work
is that we are competing for space in the pa-
per or time on television with all the other
news of the day. Alas, the life’s work of a sci'
entist may thus be reduced to a fleeting minute
or a few paragraphs, or entirely neglected.
Scientists sometimes importune jour­
nalists to do more to educate the public about
science. But we journalists are not educators
in the pedagogic sense, though it is true, and
satisfying, that people learn from what we
Requests for write. Of course, we are interested in having
us to “sell” people more conscious of science, and more
science betray a knowledgeable; it increases our potential au­
misunderstanding dience. Yet requests for us to “sell” science
ofthe role of betray a misunderstanding of the role of jour­
journalists. nalists.
A science journalist is not the agent
of scientists with information to impart, but
rather of the public who pays for the opera­
tion of the media through subscriptions and
through the purchase of goods and services
advertised in these media. Furthermore, like
any other journalists, we must maintain inde­
pendence from our sources and subjects in
order to be critical when the need arises.
By and large, scientists are more re­
sponsive now than when 1 started to report­
ers calling up with questions, more willing and
able to explain their work, more articulate in
relating their research to public interests and
concerns. It is to their advantage. Since most
research is paid for by taxpayers, informal pub­
lication of achievements through the media
is seen as a useful way of reporting to the tax-
payer-patrons and their elected officials, who
are in a position to set priorities and bestow
more money.
Joan Konner, a former dean of the
Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, has
said: “Journalism is the traffic circle of knowl­
edge. If the disciplines want to speak to each
other, or if they want to reach a wider audi­
ence, they have to speak the popular language.
That means they either speak through jour­
nalists or become journalists themselves.”
Our Science Times section has had its
imitators, which is gratifyfing. Several dozen
newspapers started their own science sections,
and others began weekly science pages. Not
all have survived the guardians of the bottom-
line. Many that have survived print mostly
health items, and almost no science news.
 page IQ
Television has been less responsive, except for
We are only beginning to realize the
public broadcasting with its shows on nature promise of the Internet, where so much infor­
and science. Cable television, however, is an mation and publication-ready pictures are just
expanding venue for such programming. a mouse click away. Many scientists and sci­
But the latest transition in science ence-oriented institutions have Web sites,
journalism — in all journalism — is reaching where they alert reporters to research findings
deeper and wider. The way we practice our and supply art directors with pictures and
craft is changing fast, blindingly fast for some graphs up to edition or broadcast time. An e-
of us oldtimers. The unprecedented multiplic­ mail message to a scientist will usually bring
ity of media outlets brings opportunities and even more information. I often wonder how
challenges. With the 24'hour all-news elec­ we put out Science Times before the Internet.
tronic media and the many Web sites on the
All of us are Scientists must also consider the im­
Internet, deadlines today are virtually con­
increasingly plications of their own use of the Internet in
tinuous. This puts increasing pressure on jour­ communicating research results among them­
being morphed
nalists to make ever quicker judgments about
into multimedia selves. When they inform their colleagues by
what the public sees and hears. It is also lead­
journalists. postings on Web sites, they may think of this
ing to a convergence of print and electronic
as little different from circulating preprints or
media. All of us are increasingly being
reporting at a seminar. But their Web sites are
morphed into multimedia journalists.
open to the public, including reporters. This
My handy laptop is only the most ob­
raises questions that must be addressed: Does
vious manifestation of the technologies that
publication by Web site constitute public dis­
are and will be changing the way we gather
semination of the research results, making
and present news. A few years ago, when a
them available for wider reporting? Will sci­
photogapher and I spent a month with a pa­
entists who do this risk reprisals by the peer-
leontological expedition in the Gobi Desert
reviewed journals with strict policies against
of Mongolia, we had to bring the pictures and
pre-publicity? Will the role of such journals
stories out with us. Now, with digital cameras
be diminished, or even bypassed?
and affordable portable transmitters, we could
We journalists are already facing such
be just a satellite link away from publication
issues. In most cases, we still prefer to wait for
from anywhere in the world. Such technolo­
journal publication. But if the information is
gies are already being used in reporting from
out there where our competitors can run with
war zones, and in time will be standard equip­
it, we may have no choice but to report find­
ment for science reporters on assignment in
ings prior to journal publication. In some
remote places. cases, I have even seen on a Web site a cri-
tique of a paper before the paper’s official pub­
handled carefully in the course of this unfold­
lication in a journal. What is a responsible
ing process, can illuminate how science is
science journalist to do? done and how responsible scientists check and
A couple of weeks ago, one of our re­
double-check themselves.
porters, James Glanz, read on a physics Web
Both scientists and journalists will find
page a report by Italian scientists who claimed
themselves in many other such situations in
they had probably made the first detection of
the months and years to come. Some new
dark matter, the exotic and mysterious par­ ground rules will become essential.
ticles that presumably constitute the prepon­
derance of matter in the universe. If correct, David Whitehouse, science editor of
it is a major discovery. The paper was to be
BBC News Online, describes how the Internet
delivered at a symposium two weeks hence.
is changing news-gathering practices. “Now I
But scientists were already talking about it
can access the home pages of institutions,
among themselves and then with reporters.
space missions, and experiments,” he says. “I
The story was clearly public, and too impor­
can go to the home page for a particular hu­
tant to be kept under wraps. So we ran a cau­
man chromosome or gene therapy experiment.
tiously worded piece more than a week before
I can look at the ever-growing number of sci­
the symposium. As it turned out, at the sym­
entists’ home pages and see what they look
posium other scientists offered evidence con­
like and even read about their hobbies.”
tradicting the Italian report, and our reporter
Whitehouse warned that ready access Ready access
wrote a long article to that effect. to so much information is not entirely for the to so much
Scientists may use this case to argue
better. Don’t get lazy, science journalists. Don’t information is
that journalists should not have written about
yield your role as an evaluator of what is truly not entirely for
the Italian report on the basis of the Internet
important news to the journals, public rela- the better.
posting; they should have, instead, waited un­
tions offices and other tenders of these Web
til it was published in a peer-reviewed jour­
sites. Unless used with care, the Internet and
nal. These critics ate assuming that peer re­
other new media outlets threaten to add to
view would have winnowed out hasty report­
public confusion over sometimes contradic­
ing of results. But not necessarily; and who is
tory claims about, for example, diet and
to say, at this point, who is right in this mat­
health, genetic engineering, global warming,
ter—the Italians or the American group with
environment protection and economic devel­
the contradictory evidence, or if either is cor­
opment, the age of the universe, and the ori­
rect? Like other endeavors, science in the
gin of life.
making can be a little messy. Such stories.
With so many sources of information

at hand, journalists bear an even greater re­
sponsibility to assess the credentials and vested
interests of those reporting research on the
Internet. In other words, treat information
from a single Web site the same as you would
information from any other single source, and
look beyond for a fuller and more thoughtful
account.
We must also be on guard against any
transfer of journalistic responsibility to the
technologists. They may be wizards at devel­
oping and tending the new means of commu­
nicating information and knowledge. But we
must make sure that we journalists control
what is communicated by the new technolo­
gies. We will still need to be able to write with
grace and clarity; to know how to explain
things simply and intelligently; to make judg­
ments of what is important and what’s not.
The roles of science journalists are un­
dergoing rapid change.
One change is the growing recogni­
tion by some editors of the interconnectedness
of science with other matters of public inter­
est. This has become especially apparent at
The Times. Science journalists are increasingly
being teamed with others to report on bio­
logical warfare, reduction of the former So­
viet Union’s nuclear weapons, conflicts of in­
terest and abuses in clinical trials for drugs,
restoration of the Everglades, and other sub­
jects.
If this practice spreads, it will give sci­
page 15
ence journalists a more central place in mass
media. No longer will we be confined mainly
to the back of the news room, often barely No longer will
within the peripheral vision of top editors. We we be confined
will be seen less as specialists than as main­ mainly to the
stream reporters with special knowledge and back ofthe
experience. news roomy
The proliferation of media outlets often barely
promises wider opportunities for science jour­ within the
nalists, particularly young reporters of the elec­ peripheral vision
tronic generation. And we older reporters are oftop editors.
retooling to reach new audiences in new ways. We will be seen
At The Times, as at other large news­ less as
papers and magazines, we have a Web site that specialists than
distributes our articles far beyond old circula­ as mainstream
tion frontiers. We are asked to participate in reporters with
online “chats” with readers. On some occa­ special
sions, we write special pieces or conduct tele­ knowledge and
vised interviews for the Web. A special news experience.
desk prepares updates on developing stories
throughout the day.
The economics of these news Web
sites is still uncertain, but not the belief that
they represent elements of journalism’s future.
Many of the organizations science
journalists work for are vigorously promoting
multimedia operations. It used to be that a
science reporter for a newspaper (which once
meant nearly all science journalists) might
vary his or her career by writing an occasional
magazine article or book. Now we are being
encouraged to spread our wings and try to fly
not only in cyberspace but through television.
The Times, for example, has a joint operation
 with Granada Television of England to de­
velop and produce television shows drawing
on the work of Times reporters. In recent
months, 1 have spent a fair amount of time
working with the Granada people on propos­
als for several science-based TV shows that
are being offered to public broadcasting and
cable networks.
One t Managements are betting on there be­
reasona ing audiences for even more news of science
predict t in the new century. One can reasonably pre­
biology it dict that biology and genetics will be among
genetics t the biggest sources of science news in the fore­
seeable future. These subjects, in particular,
will challenge the skills of popular description
sources of by multimedia journalists and provoke public
science news debate that will thrust the science writer more
in the into the forefront of journalism.
foreseeable
future. Emerson wrote: “Nothing is rich but the
inexhausible wealth of nature. She shows us
only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms
deep.”
Science is modem society’s foremost
probe of those fathoms. Carl Sagan often re­
minded us that “Science is a way of thinking
much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
In one of his books (Broca’s Brain), Sagan
elaborated on this point. “[Science’s] goal is
to find out how the world works, to seek what
regularities there may be, to penetrate to the
connections of things—from subnuclear par­
ticles, which may be the constituents of all
matter, to living organisms, the human social
community, and thence to the cosmos as a
whole.” Scientists make mistakes, of course,
and are limited by their own preconceptions
and means of investigation. Scientists recog­
nize that their view of nature is provisional,
not absolute. As Sagan pointed out, “Science
is based on experiment, on a willingness to
challenge old dogma, on an openness to see
the universe as it really is.”
Such a view of knowledge and under­
standing may not sit well with dogmatists of
whatever stripe. But if history teaches us any­
thing it is that we humans are still learning
who we are, where we are, and what we may
become, here on Earth or someday, perhaps,
as travelers to other worlds.
Science is vital to this never-ending
learning process. A journalist could not ask
for a more important and challenging story to
cover, one that keeps you engaged in learning
all your life. 1 have never regretted the fate
that steered me into a career as a science jour­
nalist. □
 Previous Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures are available
in booklet form. For a copy, contact the
School of Journalism, University of Tennessee

1989 John Noble Wilford

“Science as Exploration”

1991 Dorothy Nelkin

“Risk Communication and the Mass Media”

1993 Gina Kolata

“Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies”

1994 Victor Cohn

“Reporting — Good and Bad — on Health in America”

1996 Jim Detjen

“Environmental News: Where Is It Going?”

1997 Jon Franklin

“The End of Science Writing”

1999 Robert Kanigel

“The Perils of Popularizing Science”

2000 John Noble Wilford

“Science Journalism Across Two Centuries”
Sharon Begley

Why
Science Journalism
Isn't Science

Ninth
Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media

March 5, 2001

School of Journalism & Public Relations

University of Tennessee -------------------
 The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science,
society, and the mass media was established in 1989 by
Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.
Sharon Begley
Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949,
seven years after the government established Oak Ridge
to house workers on the atomic bomb pi'oject. The Oak
Ridger was the first successful privately owned newspaper
in the city and marked an important stage in the transition
of Oak Ridge from federal operation to private ownership
and self-government.

The 2001 Hill Lecture is dedicated to Dr. James A. Crook for

Why
his 27 years of leadership in journalism and public relations
education at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Crook served as
Director of the School of Journalism from 1978 until his retire­
ment in 2001.
Science Journalism
Published by
Isn't Science
School of Journalism and Public Relations
College of Communications
University of Tennessee
Serial editor: Mark Littmann Ninth
Professor, Chair of Excellence
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
Assistant Editor: Rhonda Rucker, M.D.
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media
Graduate Assistant

Serial design Robert Heller March 5, 2001

consultant: Associate Professor

Serial designer: Jeff Garstka

Graduate Assistant

Why Science Journalism Isn’t Science School of Journalism & Public Relations
© 2001 Sharon Begley University of Tennessee -------------------
Publication Authorization Number RO1-2901-001-01
 Sharon Begley was born and grew up in
Englewood, New Jersey, with New York skyscrap­
ers on the horizon. She earned her bachelor of
arts degree at Yale University in combined sci­
ences, with a concentration in physics, and began
work at Newsweek as an editorial assistant right
after graduation in 1977.
Less than two years later she received the
first of her many awards, the
Claude Bernard Award for
Medical Reporting. At
Newsweek Ms. Begley ad­
vanced through the editorial
ranks to become Senior
Writer for Science in 1990
and Senior Editor for Sci­
ence in 1997. In her 24
years at Newsweek, she has
won two Page One Awards
from the Newspaper Guild
of New York, two Global
Awards for Media Excel­
lence from the Population
Institute, two Deadline Club
Awards for best feature reporting in a magazine,
and many other honors for her writing.
In just the past seven years, she has written
the cover stoiy for Newsweek 29 times, on sub­
jects ranging from the puzzle of genius to global
warming, from the evolution of life to human in­
fertility, and from colliding galaxies to the quest
to cure cancer. A recent sample: “Little Lamb,
Who Made Thee? Send in the Clones.”
In addition to writing, Ms. Begley has taught
energy and environment reporting at the Colum­
bia University School of Journalism.
Ms. Begley is married to Edward Groth III.
They have two children, Sarah and Daniel.
Let me tell you the easy part of my job. Ev­
ery week, the two leading journals of science each
send journalists a tip sheet. It tells us what papers
will be published the following Thursday or Fri­
day in those journals. It includes abstracts in pretty
simple lay language. I’d like to read you a recent
one. Now don’t fall asleep, because there’s going
to be a quiz as I go along. I want you to play sci­
ence journalist: decide which of these papers you
should write about for your next issue.
1. An LED made from silicon might hasten
in a new era of telecommunications technology.
The prototype silicon-based LED is already close
to being as efficient in converting electricity to light
as conventional LEDs made from other semicon­
ducting materials.
2. In Alzheimer’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob dis­
eases, proteins in the brain adopt an abnormal
structure that makes them clump together. Scien­
tists have discovered that the muscle protein myo­
globin can be induced to assume a similar guise,
suggesting that adopting these alternative “amy­
loid” structures could be feasible for many pro­
teins, but that organisms have evolved ways to hold
them at bay. The rogue proteins in the brains of
Alzheimer’s and CJD patients may not be inher­
ently peculiar, but could be generated just because
the regulatory mechanisms that normally guard
against the protein transition have broken down.
3. Tiny cylindrical tubes made of a range of
different materials and known as nanotubes have
many uses in nanotechnology. Researchers report
a way to roll their own nanotubes where and when
they are needed and to required specifications.
4. A relative of a gene that controls lifespan
in yeast also controls longevity in the tiny nema­
tode worm C. elegans. Researchers report that
overexpression of S1R2.1, the C. elegans ’ coun­
terpart to yeast’s SIR2 gene, increases the mean
lifespan in worms by up to 50%.
5. A 2-year survey of over 100,000 galaxies
has produced the most detailed view yet of our
place in the universe. The new 3D map puts a fig­
ure on how heavy the universe might be.
6. Researchers have found that the degree to
which a female baboon’s sexual organs swell up
when she is in estrus is a good guide to her repro­
ductive potential. Females with larger swellings
reach sexual maturity earlier and are able to breed
more frequently. They also have more offspring,
more of which survive. Males seem to read these
signs: they fight more fiercely among one another
for the chance to mate with big-bottomed females.
As I said, choosing from among these is easy.
And scientists have few complaints about what
people like me choose for these paper-of-the-week
stories, as we call them. After all, they are pub­
lished in peer-reviewed journals.
But scientists and journalists often do not see
eye to eye on the hard parts of my job, of which
there are basically two: choosing less obvious sto­
ries by pulling together disparate pieces of research
or identifying what we might call a trend, and writ­
ing them up in an intelligent, interesting way.
What do scientists consider important? The
most rigorous measures of that are citation indi­
ces, which are an indication of which research is
important to other researchers as measured by how
often it is cited. These, as it happens, are rarely
covered in the press. For example, the most cited
papers in biology a couple of years ago were:
1. A caspase-activated DNAse that degrades
DNA during apoptosis.
2. The stmcture of the potassium channel.
3. Cleavage of CAD-inhibitor in CAD acti­
vation and DNA degradation during apoptosis.
4. Minimal machinery for membrane fusion.
5. Crystal structure of bacteriophage T7 DNA
replication complex at 2.2 angstrom resolution.
Well, I could go on, but I don’t want to bela­
bor the point: what scientists consider important
eire methodology papers and incremental advances.
That’s not what people like me write about. We
write about challenges to the standard big bang
model of how the universe began. Missions to
Mars. The Atkins Diet. Asteroid impacts. Cancer
cures. Cloning humans. Early puberty.
What we have here is a divide between what
scientists themselves consider important and what
science journalists consider worth covering. Why
is it that the discoveries that scientists deem im­
portant are not important enough for Time,
Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times, the New York Tunes, and other major met­
ropolitan dailies that have a dedicated science re­
porting staff? Why are these discoveries not im­
portant enough to cover?
Science is “relevant” in so far as it affects
our daily lives. Relevant science stories include
 those on health as well as better mousetraps. Sci­
ence is also relevant in so far as it stimulates our
imagination, with discoveries in astronomy and
cosmology and planetary science. Or, science is
relevant as it informs public policy, as in news
about the effects of radioactivity, or the value of
teaching a second language in elementary school
rather than later. Science “news,” in other words,
is driven at least in part by what readers care about.
That does not always, or even usually, overlap with
what scientists care about.
The world has changed. Journalism has
changed. Science journalism has changed with it.
There is so much competing for people’s atten­
tion, not only in the old print media but also in
broadcast, on 24-hour cable, and of course on the
web, that all of us have had to be­
come crafty fishermen. What lure
What we have here is can we dangle in front of prospec­
a divide between tive readers so that they will, in
what scientists them­ the first place, just pick up the
selves consider im­ magazine or newspaper, and sec­
portant and what ond, read a science story before
(actually, we’ll even settle for af­
science journalists
ter) they flip to the movie review
consider worth cov­
ering. or celebrity page? The lures have
become ever more sophisticated,
until they are like a fishhook with
multiple, cleverly shaped barbs: if one doesn’t
hook the reader, another will, we hope. So we have
more display type than ever: headlines, decks, cap­
tions. We have larger pictures, and fancy graph­
ics, an innovation begun by USA Today in the
1980s. That means that we have fewer stories, since
to tell each story requires more pages, what with
more of each page being consumed by something
other than text. Of course, information graphics
4
can be even more efficient than words alone in
terms of space. Still, we have less text per story
even so. I used to write covers of 800 lines, about
4,000 words. Not even that is much for, say, ev­
erything you ever wanted to know about the evo­
lution of the universe or the human genome project.
Now our cover stories are lucky to be 400 lines, or
2,000 words.
But what the need for multiple barbs on our
lures also means is that the story selection is dif­
ferent. Let me illustrate with some examples from
outside science. Once upon a time, the
newsmagazines would automatically write about
the state of the union speech, or the president’s
budget request, or the latest round of peace talks
in Northern Ireland or the Middle East, or the elec­
tions in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan. Those
are duty stories: you did them because your job
was to tell readers the most important events that
happened in the world during the week you put
the magazine together. We don’t do duty stories
anymore. Unless we have an original take on one
of those stories, we simply do not give it space in
the magazine. Neither does Time, or, usually, US
News and World Report. We do the stories that
you do not see everywhere else. Instead of writing
about the latest battle in Chechnya, we write about
the attempts by Russian mothers to get their sons
another posting. Instead of writing about the Is­
raeli parliamentary elections directly, we write
about the flood of American media advisers into
the opposing campaigns.
This approach, needless to say, carries into
science coverage, too. Let’s face it: it has become
harder and harder for serious subjects, especially
complex ones, especially ones that made your high
school years hell on earth, to engage the general
 public. I’m sure I do not have to remind you that
the media are businesses. Each newspaper group,
or magazine, or network, answers to its stockhold­
ers; we are not non-profit educational organiza­
tions. If people do not buy the magazine or the
newspaper, we will go out of business. The result
is that we often skip the dutiful science story, the
one that researchers in the field regard as the most
important. We skip earnest fare
If you are tempted to such as the latest not-very-sur-
criticize the science prising space station mission. We
press for writing gee- write instead about feuding in­
side the human genome project.
whiz, eureka stories
Or a project to power a space­
that don't have much
craft with nothing but solar sails.
lasting significance, Or the latest iteration in the de­
my response is, bate over signs of life in the
you're darn right. Martian meteorite. We’ll write
That's what we do — about brain implants that let
and gladly. blind people see. We write about
designer babies. If you are
tempted to criticize the science
press for writing gee-whiz, eureka stories that don’t
have much lasting significance, my response is,
you’re dam right. That’s what we do — and gladly.
Give me all the gee whiz stories you can.
I am not, of course, talking about writing
about UFOs, astrology and the science of sex ev­
ery week. I’m not. I’m writing about neuroscience,
and genetics, and astrophysics, and developmen­
tal psychology. But the stories I choose are prob­
ably not what a room full of neuroscientists, or
geneticists, or astrophysicists would identify as the
most important offering from each of those fields.
I’ll write about how the teenage brain is a work in
progress, which goes a long way toward explain­
ing why adolescents seem unable to think straight.
6
It’s not just raging hormones. And I’ll write about
the claim of some behavioral geneticists that hap­
piness is genetic, and doesn’t change much regard­
less of your life’s circumstances. I’ll write, in other
words, about what people want to read about:
people want to read about themselves.
There is another category of story that has a
good chance of making it into Newsweek. This is
the story that comes with a cool picture. This ac­
counts in large part for our coverage of astrophys­
ics and astronomy, especially since the launch and
repair of the Hubble Space Telescope: a story about
galactic collisions that I was never able to get past
the editors before becomes a cover story when the
Hubble captures an image of such an event.
All of this is to show, I hope, why our story
selection does not track what scientists themselves
deem most important. It is the clearest example of
why science journalism is not science. It is one of
the things that some scientists blame for the grow­
ing disjunction between what scientists do, in the
lab experiments and field observations, and what
the public understands science to be.
Another reason science journalism is not sci­
ence is that journalists are not, by and large, sci­
entists. At first glance, scientists and journalists
seem like natural allies. Both tend to attract people
who are highly motivated, often iconoclastic, well-
educated, and of above average intelligence. Both
tend to be skeptical, even bordering on the cyni­
cal, as they search for some approximation of the
truth.
What do we know about what scientists and
journalists think of each other? The most thorough
examination of these attitudes was conducted by
the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt Univer­
sity. The researchers, Jim Hartz and Rick Chappell,
 surveyed more than 1,400 scientists and journal­ Now what do journalists think of scientists
ists, and reported their findings in 1997 in a study and science? Hartz and Chappell found that more
called Worlds Apart: How the Distance Between journalists have a great deal of confidence in the
Science and Journalism Threatens America’s Fu­ scientific community than have a great deal of con­
ture. Let me share with you some of what they fidence in any other institution they were asked
found. about. Fifty-one percent have a great deal of con­
First, the attitudes of the scientists surveyed. fidence in the scientific
Only 11% of those surveyed said they had a great community, compared to
Joumalists’ Confidence
deal of confidence in the press. Twice that num­ 50% who felt that way
in Various Institutions
ber said they had hardly any confidence at all. about medicine, 48%
Compare that to the 75% about the Supreme Court, Much Little
who said they had a great 15% about major compa­ confidence confidence
Scientists’ Confidence deal of confidence in the nies, and 13% about tele­ Television 13% 27%
vision. Press 35% 4%
in Various Institutions scientific community, or
Scientific Community 51% 2%
the 55% who said they Some of the more Medicine 50% 3%
Much Little interesting findings of this Supreme Court
had a great deal of confi­ 48% 2%
confidence confidence
dence in the Supreme study concerned state­ Major Companies 15% 10%
Television 2% 48%
Press 11% 22% Court. Even if we allow ments with which scien­ Organized Labor 2% 50%

Scientific Community 75% 1% that scientists are a skep­ tists and journalists had
Adapted from Hartz & Chappell, Worlds Apart, 1997
Medicine 54% 3% tical lot, 11 % suggests a various degrees of agree­
Supreme Court 55% 5% ment or disagreement.
Major Companies 14% 19%
serious credibility gap be­
Organized Labor 4% 45% tween scientists and the I find this pretty frustrating, because scien­
press. I’ll add something tists and journalists have much more in common,
Adapted from Hartz & Chappell, Worlds Apart, 1997 that is not in the graphic: it seems to me, than these stark comparisons would
the 11 % of scientists who suggest. Both groups tend to be competitive and
said they had a great deal of confidence in the me­ self-critical. They both must usually settle for par­
dia was quite a bit less than the percentages of tial truths, and for iterative advances in knowledge.
clergymen, corporate officials, military officers, Both can be accused of, from time to time, selec­
and even politicians who expressed a great deal of tively interpreting the data they gather. Both view
confidence in the media. Evidently, scientists are themselves as discovering and analyzing reality.
quite distrustful of the people who bring their work For both, to ignore or compromise the truth is a
to a larger world. form of misconduct, punishable by censure or even
What are the scientists’ more specific views expulsion from the profession.
about various media? Forty percent of the scien­ Journalists and scientists also share a com­
tists surveyed said they were afraid that media cov­ petitive streak a mile wide. In science, being first
erage of their work would emban'ass them before to publication counts enormously. In journalism,
their peers. scooping the competition — if even by 30 sec-
8 9
 onds, if you’re CNN and MSNBC — gives you field. There is, beyond these, one key trait that the
bragging rights that you can live off until the next practitioners of these professions share, one which
big story. should make each empathize with the limits on
Some superficial similarities between scien­ the other: both must be content most of the time
tists and journalists: they tend to have strong egos. with partial, half-glimpsed truths. Science is char­
That’s a polite way of saying arrogance is not an acterized as an investigation of nature, all of whose
impediment to success in either profession. Among answers are tentative, until the next observation is
their peers, both are pretty gregarious. But my col­ made, the next experiment undertaken. Science
league, a refugee from a Ph.D. program in ocean­ does not believe in immutable truths; even
ography, tells me that now Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction had to
that he’s a journalist he has be modified by Einstein. Journalism is often called
Scientists’ Ratings much more fun at cocktail a rough draft of history; rough drafts are never the
of Science & Technology parties because he has a final word. Both revise the stories they tell as more
Coverage by Various much wider range of poten­ information becomes available. The scientist adds
News Media tial chatter matter. Random new experimental results, and new interpretations
Excellent Poor/
people are more likely to of existing results, to an ever-expanding corpus of
Fair hang around and talk to you knowledge, trying to fit data into theory or to
National paper 19% 48% when you say you’re a jour­ modify theory based on new data. The journalist,
National radio 14% 53% nalist; if you say you’re a too, updates his or her story as new information
National magazine 7% 61%
scientist they usually affect becomes available.
Local radio 5% 78%
Local paper 4% 77% being impressed and Science journalists are accused of being un­
National TV news 3% 76% quickly get away before you fairly selective in what information they present.
Local TV news 1% 89% bore them to tears. So are scientists. Data, of course, are in the eye of
A lot of scientists are the beholder. Without getting bogged down in the
Adapted from Hartz & Chappell, Worlds
Apart, 1997 social and political naifs, controversy called the science wars, let me sim­
without a real clue as to how ply say that scientists have been known to decide
society works. I was at a what counts as data on less than purely objective
luncheon a week ago, where the subject was ge­ grounds; you can find examples of such selective
netically modified crops. An agronomist in the au­ interpretation in fields ranging from developmen­
dience asked the speaker, a bioethicist, why the tal biology, where for decades the contribution of
public, especially in Europe, was so distioistful of cytoplasm to the earliest stages of the developing
GM crops even though “we keep assuring them zygote was deemed unworthy of investigation, to
that they are perfectly safe.” ethology. This is my favorite example. Research­
All of the similarities I’ve listed might, you ers who studied wild horses in the American West
would think, make scientists and journalists kin­ never even considered testing for the paternity of
dred spirits, sympathetic to the motivations, frus­ foals because it was assumed, under the harem
trations and pressures that characterize the other’s model of mustang herds that then reigned, the al-
10
 pha male stallion just had to be the sire. When they spread their seed widely. One biologist calls these
did test for paternity, it turned out that more than just-so stories: see a trait, like a behavior, and make
half the foals were fathered by a male who, again up a story for how it conferred selective advan­
under the harem model, had no access to the herd’s tage.
females. So, you find what you seek; what you Let’s look at what happened when research
seek depends on your ruling paradigm. It’s the produced data that did bear on the question. An
lamppost problem: the drunk searches for his keys examination of X and Y chromosomes showed that
under the lamppost not because he dropped them they have significantly different mutation rates.
there but because the light is better there. Science That suggested that our female ancestors had typi­
looks for knowledge cally had multiple mates. You could spin a just-so
Scientists’ Agreement with Various where the reigning para­ story for this, too: by having multiple consorts,
Negative Statements about digm points. females confused paternity. The males in the group
the News media Similarly, in science could not be sure if the infant was theirs or not. So
journalism, if you buy to hedge their bets, they
Agree Disagree into the ascendant model all provided the female
Lack understanding 91% 5% of evolutionary psychol­ with resources and pro­ Journalists’ Agreement with Various
More interested in sales 88% 4%
ogy, which holds that tection. That would work Negative Statements about
Focus on the trendy 79% 7% the News Media
Seek the sensational 76% 13% modem human behavior as a selective factor in fa­
Want instant answers 75% 10% is shaped by genes se­ vor of female promiscu­ Agree Disagree
Ignorant of process 69% 18% lected for the advantage ity. This finding was re­ Lack understanding 77% 19%
Can’t interpret results 66% 18%
they gave our eaily ances­ ported almost nowhere in More interested in sales 56% 37%
Overblow risks 61% 20%
tors in passing on heri­ the popular press. For Focus on the trendy 67% 19%
Lack education 58% 19% 22%
Seek the sensational 69%
Rarely get details right 56% 24% table traits to subsequent some reason, the media
Want instant answers 52% 36%
Don’t grasp funding need 54% 26% generations, then you be­ seem completely smitten Ignorant of process 46% 42%
Focus on personalities 49% 28% lieve that male promiscu­ with what used to be Can’t interpret results 48% 35%
ity and female coyness called sociobiology and is Overblow risks 45% 43%
Adapted from Hartz & Chappell, Worlds Apart, 1997
43%
reflect adaptations that now called evolutionary Lack education 40%
Rarely get details right 62% 20%
improved the reproduc­ psychology. Don’t grasp funding need 53% 28%
tive success of our ancestors. You do not even think Given the many Focus on personalities 70% 13%
to question whether something other than sex similarities, why does
might have shaped human behavior — something there exist such a yawn­ Adapted from Hartz & Chappell, Worlds Apart, 1997
like economic calculations. As a result, such an ing chasm between sci­
alternative does not find its way into your stories. ence and journalism?
Evolutionary psychology has been much in the Well, there are scientists who don’t speak En­
news lately, and not only after the former occu­ glish and journalists who don’t speak science. In
pant of the Oval Office strayed and inspired sto­ the First Amendment Center survey, the journal­
ries about alpha males being genetically driven to ists said that scientists’ jargon, and the endless
12 13
qualifications they attach to their findings, make
communicating their research to the public all but
impossible. “The need to obtain adequate energy
confinement simultaneous with operation near the
neo-classical tearing mode beta-limit and at/above
the Greenwald density limit suggests that careful
optimization of plasma performance will be re­
quired ...”
I didn’t write about that; I can’t tell you what
it’s about. But 1 did write about this: “The herita-
bility of mother’s negativity is estimated by squar­
ing the path from G1 to mother’s negativity, and
adding this to the square of the path from G2 to
mother’s negativity. H31 represents the path from
the crosslagged genetic factor G3 to the environ­
mental measure at time 1, and H34 represents the
path from G3 to the adjustment measure at time
2.” That’s from a study attempting to tease apart
the relative contributions of heredity and environ­
ment to the personality traits a child develops.
To generalize, and possibly to overgeneralize,
scientists see reporters as imprecise, as mercurial,
and as possibly dangerous. To many scientists, re­
porters have no sense of what is really important,
and no sense of proportion: a tiny study, looking
at only half a dozen people and their dietary hab­
its or exposure to a suspect chemical, can be blown
up into a scare headline and story about the dan­
gers of, say, using a cell phone.
The reporter sees the scientist as arrogant, as
self-absorbed, as narrowly focused, as out of touch
with the concerns of real people and with the in­
terests of those people.
What are the deeper differences between the
two fields that explain the suspicion and even an­
tagonism each has for the other?
Science and journalism differ in their pace
and time frame. Science is slow. Science is pa­
tient; studies lasting years are common in many
fields. Scientists must have a temperament that
makes them able to dedicate a good portion of their
life to a single question. Science is careful, gener­
ally conservative, and, especially these days, com­
plicated. Journalism is fast. Journalism is edgy. The
temperament of a journalist, even one who spe­
cializes in science, is jumpy, fickle, always look­
ing for the next big thing. Astrophysics today, ge­
netics tomorrow.
I recently wrote a cover story on the contro­
versy over the first Americans, and the notion that
people came here much earlier than had been
thought, but not from the part of
Asia that we’re all taught in Scientists see report­
school, and maybe not from Asia ers as imprecise, as
at all. I did another cover on how
mercurial, and as
conditions in utero affect one’s
possibly dangerous.
risk for what are usually thought
of as adult-onset diseases reflect­
ing either genetics or lifestyle;
this work suggests that the risk of cancer, stroke,
other cardiovascular disease, allergies, and diabe­
tes are all affected by conditions in the womb. An­
other cover looked at AIDS in Africa.
One of the biggest puzzles about journalists
among scientists is a question of commitment:
Why do we write a big story about some piece of
research and then show little interest in revisiting
it? Journalists have moved on, sniffing for the next
big story. Unlike in science, iterative advances
don’t count in journalism. We are always looking
for new, new, new and, even better, toppling con­
ventional wisdom. Look at how much coverage
was devoted to the discovery just over a year ago
that the adult brain generates new neurons. Or that
15
a single gene improves a mouse’s memory tremen­
dously. (Of course, in this last case, it didn’t hurt
that the biologist named his smart mouse Doogie,
as in the TV character Doogie Howser, M.D.) Sci­
entists, meantime, are left refining, correcting or
building on the original discovery. Needless to say,
this gives a somewhat warped picture of what sci­
ence is like.
Science and journalism differ in the relative
importance they place on the discoverers and the
discoveries. Scientists’ conservatism, even mod­
esty, is conveyed in the titles and abstracts of their
papers:
Fertilization of mammalian eggs is fol­
lowed by successive cell divisions and
progressive differentiation, first into the
early embryo and subsequently into all of
the cell types that make up the adult ani­
mal. Transfer of a single nucleus at a spe­
cific stage of development, to an enucle­
ated unfertilized egg, provided an oppor­
tunity to investigate whether cellular dif­
ferentiation to that stage involved irrevers­
ible genetic modification. The first off­
spring to develop from a differentiated cell
were bom after nuclear transfer from an
embryo-derived cell line that had been
induced to become quiescent. Using the
same procedure, we now report the birth
of live lambs from three new cell popula­
tions established from adult mammary
gland, fetus and embryo. The fact that a
lamb was derived from an adult cell con­
firms that differentiation of that cell did
not involve the irreversible modification
of genetic material required for develop­
ment to term. The birth of lambs from dif­
ferentiated fetal and adult cells also rein­
forces previous speculation that by induc­
ing donor cells to become quiescent it will
be possible to obtain normal development
from a wide variety of differentiated cells.
That, of course, is the abstract of the paper
announcing the creation of Dolly, the first mam­
mal cloned from an adult cell.
Journalists are looking for the eureka mo­
ment. When I wrote about the repair of the Hubble
Space Telescope several years ago, a key part of
the story came from an optics expert at the Space
Telescope Science Institute who figured out how
to design a corrective lens that astronauts would
place over the defective one. How did you figure
it out, I asked? Well, James Crocker was taking a
shower in a hotel near Munich and became in­
trigued by the showerhead, which slid vertically
on a track and tilted 90 degrees. What if, he won­
dered, NASA built an instrument that slid into one
of Hubble’s instrument bays, then
deployed corrective mirrors? “It Journalists are look-
just flashed,’’ he said. “The Ger- eureka
mans make great cars. And great moment
plumbing fixtures.” That was
Crocker’s eureka moment, and it
figured prominently in the story. Journalists try to
humanize science. Scientists run screaming from
the first person singular, at least in their papers.
Science and journalism also differ in the stan­
dards of evidence they demand. I think of it this
way: Scientists work to the standards of criminal
cases; journalists are content with meeting the stan­
dards of civil cases. The story on how health be­
gins in the womb is an example. The case is far
from proved, but there is a lot of supporting evi­
dence. And it’s an intriguing idea. So we did it as
17
 a cover. Scientists for the most part are cautious
about saying something is true unless they think
it’s “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
In science, there are multiple levels of confi­
dence in how likely a given hypothesis is to be
true, based on current evidence. Journalists settle
for “the preponderance of evidence.” They are
more likely to focus on whether it’s interesting and
important if it’s true, and less concerned with nu­
ances about how sure the scientists are about its
being true.
As an example, recall the recent paper in
which scientists suggested that crops engineered
to contain the Bt gene, which makes a sort of natu­
ral pesticide, might harm monarch butterfly cater­
pillars. This was published in Nature, which is
hardly an obscure journal. Since genetically modi­
fied crops are a hot issue right now, it was obvious
that reporters would seize on this finding. Yet many
were criticized for giving prominence to a prelimi­
nary finding with implications for a controversial
technology. In the eyes of many scientists, espe­
cially those who have staked out a position on the
safety of GM crops, this was another instance of
journalists playing fast and loose with standards
of evidence.
But journalists cannot wait for every last
doubt to be resolved, for every open question to
be closed. Journalists have to make news calls
every day, sometimes every minute, based on the
information at hand then. The public has a right, it
seems to me, to hear and take part in the debate as
it unfolds. This was not a wrong call; the process
worked as it should. Are there stories that, with
perfect 20-20 foresight, we would have skipped?
Sure. Flesh-eating bacteria did not turn out to be
the civilization-ending scourge that they seemed
from press accounts.
Science and journalism differ starkly in how
they report results. I told you about my scientist in
the shower. Scientists and journalists differ in their
emphasis on individuals. Reporters like to bring
humans into the foreground while scientists hide
them under the passive voice and other devices.
Even more striking, scientists and journalists dif­
fer in, well, how excited they let themselves get in
public. For the most part, scientists are reluctant
to call their work a breakthrough. Science proceeds
incrementally. Almost by definition then, no single
step is of the “good god, look what I’ve found!”
variety. But that is what reporters are after. We are
looking for the scientific equivalent of the Supreme
Court decision, or the election re­
sult, or the passage of legislation,
or the shooting. We are looking, in Scientists are reluc­
other words, for some defining tant to call their
event. work a break­
When we think we’ve found through. Science pro­
it, we do not want to muddy the ceeds incrementally.
narrative with a lot of backtrack­
Almost by definition
ing about how the groundwork for
then, no single step
the current discovery was laid over
the years, or about how bits and
is of the "good god,
pieces of the discovery had been look what I've
trickling out for some time, or that found!" variety.
we’re writing about it because it
was reported in Nature this week,
even though it was published in a more obscure
journal months earlier but nobody noticed.
Journalists need words like “now” and “to­
day.” This is the news business. The prevailing
model of news is event-driven. Science does not
have events so much as it has pseudoevents. It has
publications; we write about those, not the actual
19
 discovery, and certainly not the groundwork that
came before.
This, I need not tell you, gives a skewed pic­
ture of how science operates. In a straight news
story about a discovery, you rarely read about the
dead ends, the hypotheses that turned out to be
wrong, the experiments that failed, or the dozens
of other researchers whose work set the stage of
the latest findings. Discovery is instead presented
as a linear, even inevitable journey from bright idea
to brilliant experiment, with a resident troupe of
experts leading the way.
Science and journalism are also divided by a
language barrier. I don’t mean words like
“monoamine oxidase” or “path coefficient.” I mean
that reporters and scientists differ in their under­
standing of common words, such as “theory.” Sci­
entists use the word theory in a way that no one
else does. In common usage, a theory is an unsup­
ported opinion, little better than a guess. “Oh, that’s
just a theory.” But to a scientist, a theory is a well-
supported collection of ideas that has been con­
firmed by a lot of research, and that makes sense
of a disparate body of knowledge. A theory is just
a bit shy of a law.
Science and journalism differ in their under­
standing of the concepts subjectivity and objec­
tivity. To a scientist, the proof of objectivity is in
the results: they must be replicable. You can un­
derstand scientists’ dismay, then, when a story
about their research is “balanced” — made “ob­
jective” — by the inclusion of some cockamamie
criticism that is not backed by anything like the
rigorous research of the original claim.
The journalistic concept of objectivity is an
import from coverage of politics and social issues.
In these spheres, there is seldom a clear-cut, in­
disputably right answer. There are opinions and
ideologies (which science has, too, but that’s a dis­
cussion for another day). If you write about abor­
tion or school vouchers or capital punishment, you
balance your story by including the views of the
opposing sides. In political reporting, it is com­
mon and appropriate to “get the other side”: if a
Democratic senator offers an opinion, a Republi­
can gets comparable time or inches. This doctrine
of “balance” is still taught proudly in journalism
schools. It is considered a sign of fairness. Though
let’s not forget that conflict packaged in sound­
bite-sized chunks often wins higher ratings and
makes for a more dramatic story than more cir­
cumspect reporting where the journalist actually
weighs the evidence.
But while journalists rightly defend the need
for balance in what one atmospheric scientist calls
“truly bipolar stories,” how many scientific con­
troversies are really two-sided? More likely, there
will be several competing paradigms and a bunch
of marginal ideas kicking around scientific con­
troversies. And when the issues have high-stakes
political winners and losers — like global wann­
ing — special interests compete to have their spin
included. Hence you get stories filled with the
views of what this scientist calls environmental
catastrophists, technological comucopians, ideo­
logical opponents of collective controls on entre­
preneurial activities. And each interest often has
its hired or favored Ph.D.s ready to explain why
carbon dioxide buildup will be either catastrophic
or good.
In the name of “balance,” an assessment by
200 scientists from industry, academia, govern­
ment and green groups, two-years-in-the-making
and refereed to within an inch of its life, gets com-
parable space or airtime to lone, industry-funded
“contrarian” scientists saying it “ain’t so.” To sci­
entists, this parade of dueling scientists isn’t “bal­
ance” but distortion.
In science all opinions are not equal, and sci­
entists cringe at reporters’ habit of covering mi­
nority opinions with no attempt to report the rela­
tive credibility of these views. The public — and
political leaders — are left to do that. The “duel­
ing scientists” get equal time or space, confusion
sets in, and outlier opinions win equal status at the
bar of public opinion with more widely accepted
views. Reporters believe that to report scientific
credibility “calls for a judgment on the part of the
journalist, and most reporters lack qualifications
to do that.” Even reporters who cover science ex­
clusively sometimes feel ill-equipped to judge the
validity of a scientific claim, much less take sides
in a scientific dispute.
But values come into play here, too. Some­
times a minority view in science eventually be­
comes the consensus view. What if the majority is
wrong? In Britain, the majority of animal health
experts a few years ago believed that mad cow
disease posed no threat to human health. A few
skeptics argued for a more cautious policy re­
sponse. It turned out the skeptics were right. In
cases with high stakes for health or the economy,
many reporters feel a duty to cover both the scien­
tific debate and the underlying value debate. How
well we fulfill that duty is another story.
Science and journalism differ, too, in the
perceived purpose of communication. I refer you
back to the example from the physics journal. I do
not think it is only journalists who would have
trouble deciphering those words. In all likelihood,
other scientists, even other physicists, those not in
this specialty, would have little idea what the au­
thors are trying to communicate. So it seems to
me that the basic purpose of scientific communi­
cation is not communication. If it were, then tech­
nical jargon would be used more judiciously, and
editors would place more of a premium on plain
English. What is it, then?
Priority. Staking a claim. Keeping outsiders
out.
And what might be the pur­
pose of science communication,
Journalism is about
science articles, in a newspaper or
general interest magazine? Sci­
telling a story, one of
ence has, for many years, occu­ many that might be
pied a middle ground at many possible. Science is
publications. It lies somewhere about telling the
between such deadly earnest sto­ complete story, no
ries as the latest election in Tur­ matter how long it
key, the ongoing wrangling over takes or how boring
the budget on Capitol Hill, the •a •
It IS.
pros and cons of privatizing So­
cial Security . . . and the fluff of
reality TV or the hot new fashion designer. Sci­
ence has to be more fun than the first group, but
more substantive than the second.
Science, editors think, brings their publica­
tions some cachet. It attracts people who consider
themselves lifelong learners, who are curious about
the world. Depending on how you slice the demo­
graphics, these tend to be loyal readers, and some­
times good marketing targets. We survive, after
all, only if advertisers buy pages in our magazine.
No honest journalist can deny that one of our mis­
sions is to entertain. But that doesn’t tie my hands.
Science is entertaining, even mind-altering.
Another difference is that journalism is about
telling a story, one of many that might be possible.
23
 Science is about telling the complete story, no
matter how long it takes or how boring it is. One
of the downsides of this, I think, is that journalists
tend to over-anticipate conclusions, rushing ahead
of the data to make pronouncements. And scien­
tists tend to be cautious — sometimes rightly so,
sometimes excessively — when it comes to reach­
ing conclusions, especially when they may have
societal or policy implications.
I attended a lecture recently at which a bi­
ologist explained his work showing that, in the
brains of canaries, neurons are bom even in adult­
hood. He had carefully worked out under what
conditions of seasons, hormones and other factors
this happened. But when he was asked what rel­
evance this might have for people, he backpedaled
mightily. None none none, he exclaimed. Yet even
other neuroscientists concede that a mechanism
for neurogenesis in the adult brain of another ver­
tebrate, something that has now been found in
monkeys as well, could indeed be very relevant to
humans.
Scientists pursue new knowledge. Journal­
ists transmit it, and if they’re good, shed light on
it by pulling information together from disparate
sources and synthesizing it into something new.
Science journalists are not scientists, and that’s a
good thing for anyone who likes science — in­
cluding scientists.

if,

24
 Previous Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures
are available in booklet form.
For a free copy, contact the
School of Journalism and Public Relations,
University of Tennessee.

1989 John Nohle Wilford

Science as Exploration

1991 Dorothy Nelkin

Risk Communication and the Mass Media

1993 Gina Kolata

Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies

1994 Victor Cohn

Reporting — Good and Bad — on Health in America

1996 Jim Detjen

Environmental News: Where Is It Going?

; 1997 Jon Franklin

The End of Science Writing

1999 Robert Kanigel

The Perils of Popularizing Science

2000 John Noble Wilford

Science Journalism Across Two Centuries

2001 Sharon Begley

Why Science Journalism Isn’t Science
DAVID QUAMMEN

Midnight
In The
Garden Of
FACT&
FACTOID
Tenth
Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media

March 12, 2002

School of Journalism & Public Relations

University of Tennessee
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science,
society, and the mass media was established in 1989 by
Tom Hill, fonner publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.
Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949,
seven years after the government established Oak Ridge
to house workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak
Ridger was the first successful privately owned newspaper
in the city and marked an important stage in the transition
of Oak Ridge from federal operation to private ownership
and self-government.
The 2002 Hill Lecture is dedicated to Dr. Kelly Leiter,
Dean Emeritus of the College of Communications and Professor
Emeritus of Journalism. Through his efforts as Dean of the
College of Communications (1984-1990), the Science
Communication Program and the Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
series were established.
Published by
School of Journalism and Public Relations
College of Communications
University of Tennessee
Serial Editor; Mark Littmann
Professor, Chair of Excellence
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing
Assistant editors, Jason Gorss Jeff Garstka
serial designers: Graduate Assistant Graduate Assistant
Serial design Robert Heller
consultant; Associate Professor
Midnight in the Garden of Fact and Factoid
© 2002 David Quammen
Publication Authorization Number RO1-2910-004-02
DAVID QUAMMEN
“I moved to Montana 28 years ago for the trout fishing," says David
Quammen, “and I stayed for the snow and the privacy and the bracing
Scandinavian gloom."
Quammen was born in Cincinnati in 1948 and educated “by Jesuit priests
and Southern novelists." This education served him well. In 1970, he
graduated from Yale; published his first novel. To Walk the Line', and
embarked with a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned
a second degree.
He wrote two more novels, a collection of short stories, and, increasingly,
nonfiction articles for Harper's, National Geographic, The New York
Times Book Review, and other
magazines.
For 15 years, from 1981 to 1995,
Quammen wrote a monthly column.
“Natural Acts," for Outside
magazine. Many of the.se essays
were collected to form books:
Natural Acts in 1985, The Flight of
the [guana in 1988, Wild Thoughts
from Wild Places in 1998, and The
Boilerplate Rhino in 2000. His
column and another feature story for Outside brought him two National
Magazine Awards.
Even more awards for Quammen followed the 1996 publication of The
Song of the Dodo, his nonfiction world-trekking epic on evolution and
extinction. He received the John Buiroughs Medal for nature writing, the
New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award, the Lannan
Literary Award for Nonfiction, Great Britain’s BP Natural World Book
Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Academy Award in
Literature.
The publication of The Boilerplate Rhino in 2000 was the occasion for the
PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay and an
honorary doctorate from Montana State University.
Quammen lives in Bozeman, Montana, where, he says, “My more fevered
avocations are telemark skiing, whitewater kayaking, and ice hockey."
His new project is a nonfiction work about large predators, such as the
saltwater crocodile in northern Au.stralia and the Siberian tiger in Russia.
This book calls on him to travel (what a surpri.se) all over the world, to
places few others have seen, to study the crises of animal life on our planet.
 blooming in the summer twilight and wrecked plantation
houses and an inescapable obsession with the past. They’re
also filled with ingenious, slightly befuddling literary
techniques and narrative stmctures that reflect Faulkner’s
own interest in epistemology - that is, in the ways and the
limitations of knowing. For instance, his great early novel
The Sound and the Fury. The title itself hints ironically at
the central theme, by way of that famous passage from
Macbeth:

F I HAD TO STATE THE SUBJECT OF THIS

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

I lecture in one word, the word would be

“epistemology.” Before I say more, I’ll define that
word. According to The New Oxford American
Dictionary, epistemology is “the investigation of what
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
Signifying nothing.
distinguishes justified beUef from opinion.” In other words,
the study of blowing. Along with ontology and morals,
The novel is about a family named Compson, fallen
it’s one of the fundamental branches of philosophy.
on grim times. It’s also about epistemology - about the
Don’t panic. I’m not a philosopher, and I won’t
subjectivity of what often passes for knowledge and
pretend to be. What I am is a science writer who spent
understanding.
many ofhis formative years - arguably, too many ofthose
I’ve dialed back on my Faulkner obsession over the
years - engrossed in the works of William Faulkner.
years, in the course of my own metamorphosis from a
Faulkner’s novels, as you may well know, are filled with
young novelist into a middle-aged science journalist and
dark passions and dysfunctional Southern families and
writer of nonfiction books. But I suppose I’ve been
violence and quiet heroism and mules and wisteria vines
permanently imprinted by Faulkner’s attention to - his
warnings about - epistemology. To say it more plainly.
I’ve never stopped being interested in the ways, the styles,
Author’s Note: I have revised this text slightly from and the limits of knowing. I’ve gotten only more fascinated
what I said in my Hill Lecture.

1
2
and concerned with the different... what?... different also flies the flag of “nonfiction,” like a sleazy and

modes, I’ll call them, by which knowledge - and what treacherous pirate ship under the Union Jack. Let’s call

passes for knowledge - is acquired and communicated. this onefactoidaljive.

Tonight I want to look at three rather different modes of Factoidal jive is writing that uses factual material not
as its irrefragable substance but only to give itself an aura
knowing, and to try to shed a little light on their
of reality, consequence, and
distinguishing attributes.
The first of these modes is science. The second mode
urgency. It doesn’t let itself Factoidal jive is a form of
is nonfiction writing, in the strict, conscientious sense of be bound by the inconvenient counterfeit nonfiction -
that word, “nonfiction.” It’s too bad, incidentally, that this and mundane hindrances of and in fact it's worse and
mode, this category of literary effort, is commonly labeled
faithful factuality. As a more pernicious than
with a negative noun - non fiction - because so much
category, factoidal jive counterfeit money,
about it is positively demanding, fascinating, artful,
includes certain forms of because it tends to
compelling, and unique. It’s not something inherently less
bogus journalism, falsified devalue the real thing.
journalism, self-indulgent and
artistic than fiction, less ultimate in some sense than fiction
irresponsible journalism. It also includes a sizable group
- despite what some foolish and discontent nonfiction
of books that claim to be nonfiction, and that become
writers, who aspire to be novelists, tend to believe.
accepted by readers as nonfiction - spending dozens or
Nonfiction is simply different. It requires different skills, a
hundreds of weeks, some of them, on the “nonfiction”
different sort of effort - and it offers different rewards to
bestseller lists - but which aren’t nonfiction by any definition
the reader. But where the bar of excellence stands for
I’m willing to accept. Factoidal jive is a form of counterfeit
real nonfiction is every bit as high as where it stands for
nonfiction - and in fact it’s worse and more pernicious
fictioa
than counterfeit money, because it tends to devalue the
This nonfiction mode, defined strictly, includes any
real thing.
form of writing in which factual data comprise the basic
I feel a fair bit of heat about this subject, both on
and inviolate raw material from which a graceful literary
behalf ofrigorous journalists and nonfiction authors, and
product is shaped. It includes sciencejoumalism- in fact,
on behalf of the reading public. My rantings here are a
it should include all journalism of every sort, as well as
small part of what 1 hope might become a larger effort -
history, biography, and all other books that come labeled
by my journalistic and literary colleagues, by schools of
as nonfiction. But unfortunately there’s a third mode, which

4
journalism, and by sharp-minded, caring readers - to
clarify some protocols and ethics for this kind of writing,
to give meaning back to the word “nonfiction,” and to
distinguish factoid from Shinola.
First, a small personal anecdote to illuminate why a
writer might feel fussy about this. A dozen years ago I
was on the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, doing
field research for what became The Song of the Dodo,
my book about evolution, extinction, and a slightly arcane
field of science known as island biogeography. I was trying
hard to animate the subject with colorful - but factually
accurate - narrative episodes and characters, as well as
with scientific explication. I met a wonderfully cranky guy
named Carl Jones, a Welshman obsessed with rescuing
endangered bird species, who had come to Mauritius to
save a nearly extinct bird called the Mauritius kestrel. One
of the kestrel’s problems was that it nests in holes, little
caves, on the faces of cliffs - which was a good adaptive
strategy during the thousands of years of its evolution
before humans arrived, but was no longer adequate after
human settlers released monkeys, rats, and Asian
mongooses on the island. The mongooses, in particular,
climbed the cliffs and ate the kestrels’ eggs. One day,
Carl Jones himself climbed a cliff to check on a kestrel
nest - and I climbed along behind him.
We went hand-over-hand up a vine that grew along
the cliff face, like climbing Jack’s Beanstalk. Jones is a
large guy, about six-foot-two, maybe 210 pounds, and
with him just above me, I kept wondering whether the
vine might tear loose and send us falling. We climbed about
60 feet to a little ledge. When we got there, the kestrel
nest was abandoned - no birds, no eggs. But in a live-
capture trap that had been left baited on the same ledge,
there was a mongoose. It snarled and struggled at the
sight ofus, trying to bite through the wire of the trap. The
purpose of the trapping was science as well as pest
extermination, and Jones wanted to do a stomach assay
on the mongoose - to learn whether it had eaten kestrel
eggs. But first he had to kill it and get it down off this cliff.
His partner, who had climbed with us, distracted the
mongoose to one end of the trap while Jones grabbed its
tail beneath the trap door. For a moment, he held the
animal pinned backward. Then, as we balanced on this
tiny ledge - me with my notebook, the partner, and Jones,
all of us crowded onto a rock shelf like a window ledge
on the sixth floor of a building - the partner sprang the
door. Jones swung the mongoose over his head, bashing
its brains against the cliff side. Whap! It was a deft, risky,
and efficiently lethal maneuver. He had surprised even
himself He held up the mongoose, like a trout for the
camera, and said: “Cor. Don’t see that every day, do ya?”
Now, the expletive “Cor” is a London cockney
expression that sounded a little goofy, as Jones knew.
6
coming from a tall Welsliman on a cliffside in the India notebook. It wasn’t much, but his mildly quirky,
Ocean. So I scribbled it down in my notebook. unexpected choice of words was exactly what had made
When I wrote the book, several years later, I me consider it worth putting into the book. Why did a
included an account of that scene. The book was friendly reviewer judge me - misjudge me - that way?
published, it was reviewed, and one ofthe more positive, Because he had been made cynical by other writers who
flattering reviews appeared in The Observer of London. pretend to work in nonfiction. He had been led to realize
Please excuse my uumodesty, but Tm going to quote a that many writers create quotes -... no, not quotes; they
small bit of it, for a reason. The reviewer, someone create what are falsely
named Alexander Prater, singled out the episode on presented as quotes - when
it suits their narrative What I'd like to say about
that Mauritian cliff as an example of the wide-ranging
purposes. They do it in order the so-called nonfiction
field research I’d done. He quoted the statement by
to combine the urgency and writers who indulge in this
Carl Jones after braining the mongoose: “‘Cor,’ he says.
immediacy that legitimately practice is: They should
‘Don’t see that every day, do ya?”’ Then Mr. Prater
belongs to nonfiction with all burn in Journalism Hell.
added: “Having a man from rural west Wales talk like
the vividness and shapely But that might seem a
an East Ender is a rare slip. Quammen’s heroic,
drama of fiction. little intemperate. What
demanding book is otherwise a monument to scholarly
This practice is offensive I'll say instead is: Caveat
rigor and scientific accuracy.”'
to me for several reasons - lector. Let the reader
What does that mean? - Having a man from
only the most selfish ofwhich beware.
Wales talk such-and-such? It means that Mr. Prater
assumed that I had invented the Jones quote, based on is that, as I’ve just illustrated,
plausibility not factuality, and that I had miscalculated it tends to discredit and diminish my own work. It also
what was plausible. Therefore he criticized me, albeit undermines a whole genre of work that I venerate as a
gently, for an error of calculated invention. reader. What I’d like to say about the so-called nonfiction
But there had been no invention. There had been writers who indulge in this practice is: They should all bum
no calculation. There had only been reporting, and a in Journalism Hell. But that might seem a httle intemperate.
careful effort to fit factual material into an artistically What I’ll say instead is: Caveat lector. Let the reader
effective, scientifically accurate Uterary work. Jones had beware.
made that statement, period. I got it verbatim in my

8
 you and me, is that there are 23 deer of the species
Odocoileus virginianus, commonly known as the
I mentioned science, the first of those three modes of whitetail. The first person has written: “7:10 p.m. Twenty-
knowing. I won’t try to define “science” or to explicate its two whitetail deer.” His observation is precise - because

epistemology, because that could take the whole evening, he has recorded the exact time, and because 22 is a firm,
discrete number - but it’s not accurate, because 22 is the
and I’d probably do a bad, amateurish job. I won’t
wrong number. The second person has written: “Dusk,
presume to lecture you about Karl Popper, the importance
meadow, fading light; about two dozen deer.” Her
of falsifiability, and the hypothetico-deductive method.
observation is entirely accurate, so far as it goes, but not
I’ll simply mention that scientists, in their research and in
precise.
their communications, generally embrace three cardinal
The ideal that science sets for itself is to maximize
values, among others, and that those cardinal values are
both accuracy and precision.,Then comes that third value,
expressed by three strong, solid words: precision,
validity, which refers to the issue of whether deductions
accuracy, validity. Each of these words reflects the fact
drawn fi-om precise, accurate measurements correspond
that science proceeds toward insight by way of
to higher-order realities - by which I mean trends, patterns,
measurement.
physical laws. Stated more simply: Are you really
Precision implies that the measurements made by a
measuring what you think you’re measuring? Quantification
scientist, during either experiments or observations, are
in science must be meaningful as well as accurate and
finely calibrated. Accuracy imphes that the measurements
precise, and the assumptions by which numbers are linked
correspond closely - as closely as possible, given the
to realities must be correct. For instance, let’s say that
means of measuring - to the reality of the phenomenon
you count 23 whitetail deer in a meadow; last year, in the
measured. In good scientific work, precision and accuracy
same meadow, you counted 17 deer. From these data
are coordinated harmoniously, like the ailerons and the
you draw a conclusion: The local deer population has
rudder of an airplane.
increased by 35 percent. Does that conclusion have
How do these two values differ, and how do they
validity? If you’ve only counted one meadow, very
somethnes conflict? For a simple illustration, imagine two
people watching a herd of deer at dusk in a meadow. possibly not. Ifyou’ve counted deer in a dozen meadows,

Each person gauges the number of deer and writes an on numerous occasions, and compared those totals with

observation in his or her notebook. The reality, between numerous counts in the same meadows from last year.
 then maybe your conclusion has validity. You might safely gracefiilly, in a palatable way. Surrendering precision in
say, “The deer population seems to have increased by favor of grace, while holding firm on accuracy - this
about a third.” balancing of imperatives is central to what a science writer
does.
❖ It isn’t rocket science. Then again, it isn’t easy. It
takes the fastidiousness of an entomological taxonomist
Science journalists also face the questions ofprecision combined with the reckless panache ofa pizza chef That’s
and accuracy, but they deal with those two values in a why we get the big bucks.
way different fix)m science.
A science journalist, or a ❖
Surrendering precision in
nonfiction author writing
favor of grace, whiie holding
about science for the This brings me to factoidal jive and, for starters, a
firm on accuracy — this
general public, must strike book titled In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. That
balancing of imperatives is
a balance between divided book, published in 1965, wasn’t the first literary work to
centra! to what a science
- and to some degree, blur the line between factual writing and fiction. But it was
writer does. It isn't rocket
conflicting - hnperatives. arguably the beginning of a certain arrogant, confused
science. Then again, it isn't
On the one hand, there’s trend in which the blurring is made a point ofpride among
easy.
the unperative ofaccuracy. writers, and in which the honorable label “nonfiction” is
If science writing isn’t specifically, spuriously applied to the resulting products.
accurate, it’s worthless. On the other hand, there’s a Capote himself claimed, at the time/n Cold Blood made
contrary imperative - that the writing be graceful, its splash, that his book represented a new literary genre
streamlined, lucid, and to some degree even dramatic or - the “nonfiction novel.”
entertaining. How does the writer reconcile these It carried a subtitle; “A True Account of a Multiple
imperatives? One way is by reducing precision. By omitting Murder and Its Consequences.” Let’s take note, in
some ofthe stipulations and qualifications that are important passing, of those carefully chosen but slightly ambiguous
in professional communications between scientists, a words - “a true accounf ’ - and I’ll come back to them in
science writer for the general public can describe a a few minutes.
research effort or explain a principle accurately yet

11
 In Cold Blood tells the story of the Clutter family, “oral narrative”^ compiled by his fiiend George Plimpton
who were slaughtered in their home in a small Kansas - In Cold Blood contains a certain amount of invention
town by two lethally impetuous drifters. It describes the masquerading as fact. At least one character portrait was
capture, the subsequent trial, the personal backgrounds, falsified for dramatic effect. There’s quoted dialogue, and
and finally the execution ofthe two killers, Dick Hickock long passages of informal
and Perry Smith. It was based on official documents, such testimony also presented in Quotation marks in a
as the trial transcript, and on Capote’s personal research, quotation marks, despite nonfiction work represent a
including a large number of interviews. In particular. the fact that Capote didn’t claim to precision —
Capote spent jailhouse time with the murderers, Hickock use a tape recorder precisely this was said —
and Smith - so much time that they eventually trusted him (according to Plimpton’s that's equivalent to a
and confided parts of the story to him as a sympathetic
informants) or even take scientist claiming two or
fiiend. But in the book as written. Capote never mentions
notes while listening to these three decimal points of
himself as a role-playing character. I remember writing a
witnesses talk. Is that precision for his
college paper about/n Cold Blood in 1968, and I was
significant? Yes, it is. measurements.
struck by the fact that Capote - who had reportedly been
Quotation marks in a
so important to Hickock and Smith during their last months
nonfiction work represent a claim to precision - precisely
before execution - had made himself utterly invisible in this was said - that’s equivalent to a scientist claiming
the book. It was peculiar and artificial, I thought, but a
two or three decimal points of precision for his
legitimate tactical choice. And I still think that omission measurements. It’s easy enough for a writer to paraphrase,
was legitimate. A nonfiction author generally has the right loosely but accurately, what some person has said. But
to omit aspects of reality - which is always messy, paraphrase doesn’t make the same claim to precision-
unthematic, and cluttered with too much detail - in order or deliver the same vivid impression of immediacy - as a
to shape a coherent, economical narrative. But adding to quotation. Where did Capote get such precision? Well,
reahty, for the sake of storytelling, is a completely different evidently, he reconstructed the “quoted” statements later,
issue. back at his hotel, from memory or presumptive
And it seems now that Capote made additions as approximation. He even claimed that he had trained himself
well as omissions. According to an expose that emerged for this sort ofprodigious recall, as a kid, by memorizing
after the author’s death - it was part of a biographical sections of the New York phone book.

13 14
 At least one person involved in the case challenged
the illusion that Capote had managed to combine factual
accuracy and precision with the grace and drama of a
novel. That was Harold Nye, an agent for the Kansas
Bureau of Investigation, who later said this:
I got into trouble with Truman because he had
sent me a couple of galleys fmm his book about
my trip to Las Vegas when I went out to get
evidence on the killers, and what he had in the
galleys was incorrect. It was a fiction thing, and
being a young officer I took offense at the fact
that he didn’t tell the truth. So I refused to
approve them. Tmman and I got into a little bit
of a verbal battle, and he wound up calling me a
tyrant.^
But who’s the real tyrant, ifCapote insisted on claiming
the label “nonfiction” for vivid elaborations that he had
invented?
The same concerns apply to other books that straddle
the line between nonfiction and artful concoction.
One conspicuous example is Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil, a book about flamboyant characters
and scandalous events in the city of Savannah, by a New
Yorker named John Berendt. Like Capote’s book, this
one takes part of its titillation value from the presumption
that it describes real people, real events, true crime. The
15
book spent 216 weeks on The New York Times hardback
bestseller list - under the “nonfiction” category. But when
I started reading it, within the first few dozen pages I had
an impression of extravagant, amusing falseness. For one
thing, there were quotes - vivid, pungent, and self-
revealing quotes - that I found it hard to imagine any
journalist having captured. I flipped back and forth; I
looked again at the title page and the dust jacket. Then, at
the very end of the book, I found a small “Author’s Note”:
All the characters in this book are real, but it
bears mentioning that I have used pseudonyms
for a number of them in order to protect their
privacy. Though this is a work of nonfiction, I
have taken certain storytelling liberties,
particularly having to do with the timing ofevents.
Where the narrative strays from strict nonfiction,
my intention has been to remain faithful to the
characters and to the essential drift of events as
they really happened.
In otherwords, by JohnBerendt’s definition: It is nonfiction,
but it’s not conscientiously factual. By my definition: It’s
factoidaljive.
 Another form of factoidal jive, even more pernicious
and consequential, is occasionally produced by journalists
working as serious reporters in difficult, newsy situations.
It comes when such journalists, under pressure from
editors’ expectations or their own artistic and professional
ambitions, create elegant falsifications that appear to be
factual but are more shapely, more dramatic, than the
factual data that careful reporting has turned up. Wanting
the grace and the focus of art, wanting also the urgency
and the authority of reality, a journalist sometimes
combines the two, but conceals that act of combination
from the readers. One form of this abuse is the composite
character, presented as though it were a single, real,
individual human being.
That’s what got a reporter named Janet Cooke in
trouble twentysome years ago when she published a story
in The Washington Post about an 8-year-old heroin
addict. The story won a Pulitzer Prize, but the 8-year-old
addict didn’t exist - he was a composite. So the Post
fired Janet Cooke and returned the Pulitzer. Much more
recently - in fact, just within the past month - The New
York Times Magazine dissolved its relationship with a
bright young freelancer named Michael Finkel after
discovering that he’d created a composite character -
and had presented that character as a real, individual
person - in a stoiy about modem African slavery pubhshed
last November. On February 21, the Times ran a six-
paragraph “Editor’s Note,” admitting the discovery and
distancing itself from Finkel. Among other things, it said:
“The Times's policies prohibit falsifying a news account
or using fictional devices in factual material.” That might
seem like an obvious standard for a serious newspaper-
even for the Sunday magazine published by a serious
newspaper. But it hadn’t been obvious to Finkel. Why
not? Well, possibly because he considers himself a
nonfiction writer, not just a reporter, and because he came
of age in a publishing era when the meaning of the word
“nonfiction” has been blurred and eroded by writers such
as Capote and Berendt.
This latest case caught my attention - in fact, it
smacked me upside the head - because Mike Finkel
happens to be a friend of mine. We live in the same little
Montana town. We occasionally ski together, play hockey
together, drink together; and we work for some of the
same magazine editors. I was sad to see his career take
such a hit, and I was angry at him for what he’d done to
make it happen. I was angry for two reasons - because
he had hurt himself, and because he had further eroded
the word “nonfiction,” making readers a httle more cynical
about what passes under that label.
Two weeks ago, over martinis and broiled salmon at
my house, Mike Finkel and I talked about all this. He was
feeling confused, exhausted, sorrowful, besieged - and,
in alternating moments, either remorseful or defensive. The
situation was complicated, he said, hinting that he wasn’t
the only person connected with the Times Magazine who
 bore some guilt in this case. We disagreed, cordially but distorted the tmth by cutting these comers.”"* Whatever
diametrically, on certain points of ethics and protocols for that means, it doesn’t satisfy me.
nonfiction writing. At one point, almost recklessly, he said: And then there’s Capote’s “tme account” - as
Well, maybe I was striving for a higher truth. distinct from a less artful but more purely factual account
At that point, I - of the murder of the Clutters. In retrospect, I wonder
Nonfiction writing can be jumped on him somewhat whether he consciously chose that phrase - “tme account”
gloriously artful. Fiction more firmly than a host - because it sounded forceful yet left him some wiggle
can seem profoundly real. should jump on a guest. I room.
Whatever falls halfway had invited Finkel to my “Tmth” is a lofty word, but also a vague and
between those two house, along with some dangerous one. It has no proper role, I submit, in
genres, claiming the mutual friends, for a few discussions ofjournalistic protocols and ethics. It has no
merits of both but hours relief from his objective, definable meaning within the epistemology of
accepting the professional discomfort, nonfiction writing. It means whatever the user wants it to
responsibilities of neither, not to intensify it. The mean. It means: My vision of the world is more right,
is a lower, shabbier, more problem was that phrase -
more pure, more deep than yours is. Never mind the
muddled, less compelling “higher tmth.” When I hear
facts. Facts are mundane.
form of work. a journalist or a nonfiction
Earlier I said. Let the reader beware. Well, let the
writer talk about altering
writer beware too. Let the young, ambitious writer and
facts in service of “higher tmth,” I feel a chill of alarm and
the old, weary writer beware of shortcuts, self-indulgence,
revulsion. I feel as I’d feel hearing a glazy-eyed person
impatience with messy reality, the temptation to
say: “I killed that abortion doctor because I got a message
manufacture quotes, the dramatic advantages of passing
from God.” off composites as though they were real people, the
John Berendt offered roughly the same sort of
slippery slope between artfulness and deceit, and the
defense, with the same magic word, when he was
delusive presumption that fictions created from factual
challenged about the departures from fact in Ms Midnight particles deserve the same sort of urgent, literal credence
in the Garden. He reportedly said: “The tmth that I was as today’s news. It’s not so.
telling was the actual story, and I do not think that I Nonfiction writing can be gloriously artful. Fiction

19
can seem profoundly real. Whatever falls halfway between
those two genres, claiming the merits ofboth but accepting Previous Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures
are available in booklet form.
the responsibilities of neither, is a lower, shabbier, more For a free copy, contact the
muddled, less compelling form of work. School of Journalism and Public Relations,
There is no “higher truth” in the realm of nonfiction University of Tennessee.
writing. There’s only fact, opinion, argument, hypothesis,
and factoidal jive.
1989 John Noble Wilford
Science as Exploration

1991 Dorothy Nelkin

Risk Communication and the Mass Media

1993 Gina Kolata

Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies

1994 Victor Cohn

Reporting—Good and Bad—on Health in America

1996 Jim Detjen

Environmental News: Where Is It Going?

1997 Jon Franklin

Endnotes
The End of Science Writing
‘Alexander Prater; “The Origin of the Specious” (The Observer,
September 1, 1996.) 1999 Robert Kanigel
The Perils of Popularizing Science
- George Plimpton: “Capote’s Long Ride” (The New Yorker, October
13, 1997).
2000 John Noble Wilford
^ Plimpton, page 64. Science Journalism Across Two Centuries

“ Doreen Carvajal: “The Truth Is Under Pressure in Publishing” (The 2001 Sharon Begley
New York Times, February 24, 1998, page Bl).
Why Science Journalism Isn't Science

2002 David Quammen

Midnight in the Garden of Fact and Factoid
 Naysaying
— the ~

NincompGDps
On Being a Maven
— in a —
Misinformed Era

Eleventh
Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media

March 4,2003

College of Communication ana Information

University of Tennessee
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science, society, and the mass
media was established in 1989 by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak
Ridger, and Mary Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.

Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949, seven years after the
government established Oak Ridge to house workers on the atomic bomb
project. The Oak Ridger was the first successful privately owned newspaper
in the city and marked an important stage in the transition of Oak Ridge from
federal operation to private ownership and self-government. Naysaying
the
The 2003 Alfred and Julia HiU Lecture is dedicated to Tom Hill and his
wife Joan O’Steen, gracious supporters of the University of Tennessee and
the School of Journalism. The endowed professorship for which they were NincompGDps
the principal benefactors has been named, as they requested, in honor of
Tom’s parents, the Julia G. and Alfred G. Hill Chair of Excellence in
Science, Technology, and Medical Writing. Their gift was the impetus for
creating the School of Journalism’s Science Communication Program. On Being a Maven
In addition to the Hill professorship, Tom Hill and his sister Mary Frances ma
Hill Holton provided the endowment that estabUshed and sustains the Alfred
and Julia Hill Lecture series. Misinformed Era
Published hy
School of Journalism and Electronic Media
College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee

Serial Editor: Mark Littmann

Professor, Julia G. and Alfred G. Hill Chair of Excellence
Eleventh
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media
Serial Designer: Emily Garman
Graduate Assistant
March 4,2003
Serial Design Robert Heller
Consultant: Associate Professor

Naysaying the Nincompoops: On Being a Maven in a Misinformed Era ^ffoorof joumanm am Electronic Media
© 2003 John Rennie College of Communication and Information
Publication Authorization Number ROl-2910-004-03 University of Tennessee
 John Rennie is only the seventh editor in
chief in the 158-year history of Scientific
American. Since his appointment in 1994, he
has modernized and reinvigorated this great
publishing institution.

Rennie was bom in 1959 in a Boston

suburb. He received his B.S. in biology from
Yale University in 1981, then worked for several
years in a Harvard Medical School laboratory. In
1984 he set out to fulfill a lifelong dream—
inspired by the works of Isaac Asimov—of a
career in science writing. He covered biology,
technology, and medicine for The Economist and
a variety of other magazines and newsletters.
He joined the staff of Scientific American in
1989 as a member of the Board of Editors. He
helped plan and edit several of Scientific
American'f, single-topic issues, including “Mind
and Brain” (September 1992), which became
Scientific American's best-selling issue, and “Life, Death and the Immune System”
(September 1993), which was subsequently republished as a book. Rennie was
named editor in chief of Scientific American a year later.
Since Rennie became editor in chief. Scientific American has twice been
nominated for National Magazine Awards. “What You Need to Know About
Cancer” (September 1996) won the National Magazine Award for editorial excel­
lence in the Single-Topic Issue category.
In addition to his leadership of the monthly magazine, Rennie helped to launch
Scientific American's web site <www.SciAm.com> and Scientific American Explora­
tions, the family science magazine.
The Council of Scientific Society Presidents honored Rennie in 2000 with the
Sagan Award, given annually to those who have been “magnifiers of the public’s
understanding of science.”
This morning I was reading the Knoxville News Sentinel and I came
across this story:
Police investigating last Saturday night’s unsolved
robbery of a downtown jewelry store have so far fail­
ed to rule out that the culprits were malicious elves
or pixies. Sources inside the department fear that the
thieves may have used a time machine to flee into the
extreme past to avoid capture. However, detectives are
questioning souls in the spirit realm for possible leads.
Several alleged witnesses have testified that they saw
human burglars commit the crime, but the poUce do
not regard these reports as credible.
Well, okay, I didn’t really read that. (My apologies to the News Sen­
tinel, which would never publish anything so insane.) When the media
cover mundane happenings—ones involving crime or poUtics, for ex­
ample—nobody wastes a second positing that maybe the explanations
for these events involve the supernatural or the fantastic. And it would be
laughable to think that such far-out explanations would ever seem more
credible than would those involving famiUar, mundane agencies like flesh-
and-blood burglars.
Still, on an almost daily basis, the media present bizarre, outlandish,
counterfactual ideas as “reasonable” explanations or interpretations for
less familiar phenomena—the kinds of phenomena that science routinely

John Rennie lives in New York City. Outside of his scientific interests, he holds
a third-degree black belt in karate, and has performed professionally as a comedian.
1
 explores. Never mind that some of these paranormal ideas are com­
pletely at odds with science. People inside and outside the media become
weirdly credulous and uncritical of some crazy theories that just don’t
stand up to logical scrutiny. It seems as though people are often too will­
ing to give up the trust they have in reason and science when the subject
shifts to matters far outside their personal experience. Ironically, those
are exactly the subjects for which they should chng to science most ar­
dently.
The title of my talk is “Naysaying the Nincompoops,” which is per­
haps more pugnacious than informative. The only slightly more lucid sub­
title is “On Being a Maven in a Misinformed Era.” As you may have
already gathered, my real subject tonight
Science journalists
is the responsibility that I think science
journalists have to root out and expose pe­
have the responsibility to
culiarly unscientific misinformation that
root out and expose
peculiarly unscientific runs riot in our culture. It’s not a responsi­
bility that should fall solely to science jour­
misinformation that runs
riot in our culture.
nalists, heaven knows. But to the extent
that the public counts on science journal­
ists as the conduit for learning about le­
gitimate scientific progress, I think we also have a duty to help the public
screen out gibberish and alluring lies that pose as scientifically validated
discoveries about reality.
Is our era really so misinformed that it stands out? After all, these
aren’t the Dark Ages. Yet if you look at the gap between what people
commonly think is true and what our civilization knows, really knows in
the 2P' century, in the most technologically sophisticated country that the
world has ever seen, where literacy and education are widespread, and
even the illiterate and unschooled have access through electronic media
2 3
to almost limitless information resources ... it gets embarrassing.
Polls sometimes say that nearly half the American public doesn’t re­
member that the Earth orbits the Sun. Similarly, a third or more of the
public doesn’t believe in evolution or the Big Bang origin of the umverse.
(Actually, I’m rather skeptical of those kinds of polls and wouldn’t take
them too much at face value, but in any case, far too many people seem to
be clueless on these matters.) Meanwhile, astrology flourishes. Self-pro-
claimed psychics like John Edward have popular TV shows. Books like
The Bible Code and The Bible Code II, claiming that prophetic messages
are cryptographically hidden in the Bible, are major best sellers. People
make decisions about buying houses based on feng shui. People are afraid
that cell phones and power lines will cause cancer, despite at best mar­
ginal evidence. Europeans embrace homeopathic medicine, which doesn’t
make any biochemical sense, while they also smoke up a storm.
Yes, science can be hard—^but it’s not always hard enough to justify
these lapses. I fear that as a society we are not nearly committed enough
to shaking out the really stupid ideas, the ideas of the nincompoops.
Going back to my title, what do I mean by “maven”? I mean it in the
sense that writer Malcolm Gladwell described in his book The Tipping
Point. As he noted, “maven” is a Yiddish word meaning “one who accu­
mulates knowledge.” It’s someone with a somewhat obsessive drive to
collect information on one or more topics, and a twin drive to then share
that information with others. They’re information brokers, living data
banks. Obviously, those are good traits to find in anybody who is a jour­
nalist, and they seem to be traits especially pronounced in science jour­
nalists because their profession requires them to track information in so
many diverse technical fields. What’s more, being a maven also seems to
be a trait at least as common in people who routinely read or otherwise
 consume science journalism, because what are they doing if not gath­ as my being obnoxious on the subject of science goes, my feeling is
ering somewhat esoteric information for its own sake? that if it’s worth being wrong in a good cause, it’s worth being spectacu­
But one of the frustrations of being a maven is that, however much larly wrong!
you may enjoy sharing your knowledge, you don’t necessarily persuade
What Is Science?
others of its worth or even its truth. For all that science can be beautiful,
enlightening, and socially beneficial, it can also sometimes be punishingly If we’re going to spend time criticizing various activities and ideas as
tough on your preconceptions. And understanding science—areally under­ misinformation and bad science, then
standing it—can put great demands on one’s attention and concentration. we should at least pause first to con­ The reliance of
Small wonder that many people instead prefer unscientific ideas or sider, What is good science? It can be science on empirical
worldviews that might be false but are certainly more accessible and more surprisingly hard to give a definition validation and the
comforting. It could make you despair of sharing any scientific knowl­ that would satisfy most philosophers testing or falsifica­
edge. But if you’re a maven who is a science journalist, of course you and scientists, although people have tion of new ideas
need to try. tried for centuries. As a body of knowl­ gives science a
Now, who am I to cast stones at ignorance, and to set myself up as a edge, science is a collection of empiri­ uniquely valuable
critic? What makes me think I’m so smart? (And why do I have to be so cally vahdated facts, observations, con­ relation to truth.
obnoxious?) Good questions. I’m not a scientist; I’m not an expert on cepts and principles that describe the
anything. That’s the situation journalists usually find themselves in, of observable universe and try to explain how it works. It’s also an investiga­
writing about subjects with some level of authority borrowed from their tion of the universe that relies heavily on observation, experimentation,
sources. There are a few journalists who are expert commentators and and reasoned logic based on what’s called methodological naturalism.
bring a rare clarity of thought to their analyses, but 1 don’t pretend to be That is, for the purpose of drawing conclusions about what makes the
one of them. universe the way it is, science provisionally assumes that there are natural
So I’m not asking anybody to beheve me, to take my opinion as gos­ laws, that these laws remain fairly constant over time, and that—^unless it
pel. I do think people should listen to what the scientists have to say and can be empirically demonstrated otherwise—no supernatural forces be­
respect their views on matters of what is good science. The scientists may yond those laws are at work.
not always be right, but it seems to me that their empirically defended This is not the only way to understand the universe. It is not even the
position is the most reasonable place to start. I think that science is a great best way to understand the universe for some purposes, like writing a love
human endeavor and a uniquely valuable way of trying to understand the letter. It may not completely capture the ultimate Truth, whatever that
universe, and it would be better if more people understood it. And as far may be. But the reliance of science on empirical validation and the testing
or falsification of new ideas gives science a uniquely valuable

4 5
 relation to truth. Science is not a perfect or even purely objective way pseudoscientific (e.g., specious arguments about how living things
of seeking truth, but it is the only way that systematically tries to elimi­ display a kind of “irreducible complexity” that could not have evolved)
nate biases and to rise above subjectivity and anecdote. and distorted science (e.g., citing genuine unsolved problems of evolu­
Antisdence, Pseudoscience, and Distorted Science tion as disproofs of it). In the end, it’s better and more intellectually re­
warding not to get sidetracked into the Linnaean exercise of categorizing
So if that’s science, what’s the alternative?
these things, but instead to look at the actual arguments and see how they
If you look at the many different types of misinformation trotted out
fall short of being good science. (It’s also more fun.)
as fact, you see a wide range of fallacies and con jobs. Nevertheless, cer­
As we work our way through these examples, we’ll have a chance to
tain patterns repeat themselves frequently—often enough that I often find
see some of those recurring patterns of error and deceit. I’ll try to point
myself filing them into three rough categories or species of hokum. At
out some of the more interesting arguments cited by their proponents—
one extreme you have what we might call Nonscience or Antiscience—
it’s useful in understanding how science itself is so often misunderstood.
ideas or subjects that imphcitly or expUcitly reject recognized tenets of
And you’ll also see how we in the media so often feed that misunder­
established science, or even of rationality itself. Then we have
standing (wittingly or unwittingly).
Pseudoscience—subjects that claim to be scientific investigations of phe­
Tempting as it is. I’m not going to say very much about some of the
nomena and that may have the formal appearance of some kind of sci­
most obvious sources of that extreme I’m calUng Antiscience: the TV
ence, but that in practice violate the rules of good scientific inquiry. Spe­
psychics. The Bible Code books, and the like. There’s no question in my
cifically, pseudosciences are usually desperate to prove that their subjects
mind but that they are purveying nonsense and deserve to be raked for it.
are real and valid, and so they set a fallaciously low bar of proof. And
Science journalists do have a duty to help show up their hooey at every
finally we have Distorted Science—collections of genuine research find­
opportunity. But I’m not going to say much about them because, let’s face
ings that tendentiously support a particular argument, carefully packaged
it, these phenomena might as well be on the other side of a big archway
with the intent of misleading audiences about the wider state of scientific
with the slogan “Abandon All Brains, Ye Who Enter Here” written on it.
knowledge or opinion.
The people who gravitate toward these things are not looking for some­
The big problem with this categorization scheme of mine is that it
thing that science and reason can give them. And the psychics and mys­
suggests the different kinds of fake science are more fixed in their charac­
tics and others of their ilk know that, and play to that.
teristics than they really are. In actuality, all the most interesting nonsense
So on these matters, it really does no good for me to issue some
combines elements of all three categories. For example, so-called “scien­
plaintive summons on behalf of critical, scientific thinking—^“Walk to­
tific creationists’’ will in the same breath often use arguments that are
ward the light, all are welcome in the light!” Because if you do try to burst
flatly antiscientific (e.g., that the earth is only thousands of years old) and
their balloons with science, here’s what happens: You get Shakespeare.

6 7
 You get Hamlet thrown in your face. They will raise one eyebrow and
recite, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt
of in your philosophy.” The Horatio speech: the last refuge of the truly
irrational.
I think of the More Things in Heaven line as the first of what I some­
times call the Misguided Myths of Science. These are misconceptions
about science that are widespread in the public, and that people with un­
scientific views love to use to defend themselves against reasoned criti­
cism. Basically, they are ways for these people to say, “I’m not the one
being unscientific—you are!”
Like all good myths, the More Things in Heaven Myth has its foun­
dation in a genuine truth, which is that scientists frequently discover phe­
nomena that they never knew existed, and might at one time have thought
to be impossible. The discovery of X-rays just over a century ago re­
vealed an entire category of elec­
The discovery of tromagnetic emissions that nobody
X-rays just over a had imagined. The idea of conti­
century ago revealed an nental drift used to seem like a fan­
entire category of electro­ tasy, because what could move
magnetic emissions that whole continents? Cosmologists
nobody had imagined. are still trying to come to grips with
the fact that about 95 percent of our
universe consists of invisible energy and matter unlike anything we know,
and that some unidentified force is making the universe expand faster as it
gets older, in total defiance of predictions. Didn’t that great biologist J. B.
S. Haldane once write, “The universe is not only queerer than we imag­
ine, it is queerer than we can imagine”? So why should anything seem
impossible?
8 9
The fatal flaw in the More Things in Heaven Myth is that it tries to
leapfi'og over the scientific process. Not everything is possible. Not every­
thing is real. The scientific method, based on reproducible experiment and
observation and logic, is a way of rationally building the case for what is
real and what isn’t. You have to build a proof. Basically (sorry, Shakespeare)
the framework of science doesn’t include more things in heaven and earth
until they have been dreamt of in our philosophies—and then tested, tested,
tested.
But the psychics and their dupes—er, customers—er, clients are not
interested in that. So for today, let’s leave them to their seances and tea
leaves, and concentrate on less lost causes.
Let’s start off with something easy, something that is so self-evidently
contrary to all science and commonsense that the very mention of its name
should make us cringe. It should be ludicrous, but it should still have a
stupefyingly large following. Which to choose? How about... the Moon
Landing Hoax?
The Moon Landing Hoax
Back on July 20,1969, when I was 10 years old, I remember watch­
ing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the Moon. Or did I? Maybe
I’ve just been a gullible rube. Because had I been a keen-eyed observer
from Paranoid-Conspiracyland, or were I Nashville’s own Bart Sibrel,
apparently I would have noticed certain inconsistencies and flaws in the
so-called Moon landing that would have revealed it to be a fake.
What kind of flaws? Why, the fact that photographs from the Moon’s
surface don’t show any stars in the sky. The shadows indicate multiple
light sources, not just the Sun. The rocket exhaust from the lunar lander
should have left a blast crater, but it didn’t. And so on and so on, the point
 being that the American government, when it realized that it couldn’t
make good on Jack Kennedy’s vow to reach the Moon in a decade but not
wanting to lose face to the Soviets during the Cold War, decided to fake
the whole event on a movie set.
Wow. That’s just breathtakingly nuts.
It would be easy to write off the Moon Hoax idea as fringe nuttiness,
except for two things. One is that polls suggest between 6 and 10 percent
of the American public now does have doubts about whether the Moon
landing occurred. That’s too many people. The other is that this wacky
point of view was given an hour of prime time in Febraary 2001 by Fox.
That’s the Fox Broadcasting Company,
All we can really the entertainment division, which brought
do is just forcefully us Alien Autopsy and similar “science”
refute this nonsense at documentaries. It shouldn’t be confused
every opportunity. with Fox (“Fair and BalancedAVe Report.
You Decide”) News, which to the best of
my knowledge has never suggested that the Moon Hoax is part of the
liberal media conspiracy.
What about those weird discrepancies that the doubters mentioned?
Aren’t they on to something? After all, shouldn’t there be stars? Shouldn’t
there be a crater? What’s up with the shadows?
Those are all decent questions. Not surprisingly, they also have de­
cent answers. No stars are visible in the photos from the lunar surface for
the same reason that you won’t routinely see stars in a photo you take of
someone in your backyard some night. Stars are always much dimmer
than nearby visible objects, so they don’t show up at the same exposures.
And the Sun isn’t the only source of Ught for the photos on the Moon;
there’s also abundant hght reflecting from the Earth in the sky and from
10
the bright lunar surface itself. And the Lunar Module didn’t leave a
blast crater because the lunar surface is solid, with only a few inches of
dust on top, not enough to form a crater.
If Bart Sibrel and the Moon Hoax people have a redeeming quality, it
might be that they do sincerely seem to believe what they’re saying. Be­
ing sincere, if it means being sincerely a nincompoop, is not much of a
claim to greatness. I’ll grant you. But at least they may not be consciously
trying to hoodwink the pubUc.
I have vastly less respect, however, for the people at the network be­
hind this program. Let’s not delude ourselves about this. They aren’t stu­
pid. They don’t think the Moon landing was a hoax. They put on a show
like this cynically, knowing that people would watch it, knowing that some
portion of the audience would fall for it, and not caring. Oh, the producers
try to give themselves a Uttle plausible deniabihty by starting the show
with a disclaimer: “The following program deals with a controversial sub­
ject. The theories expressed are not the only possible explanation. View­
ers are invited to make a judgment based on all available information.”
But what’s that supposed to mean? “Fair and Balanced. We Report. You
Decide”? Come on. The show didn’t demonstrate any interest in support­
ing explanations other than that Apollo was faked.
Still, wasn’t it all just good fun? Did anybody really get hurt? Well,
NASA thinks it did. NASA found that it spent enough time answering
questions about whether it had really put someone on the Moon that it
considered spending $15,000 to commission a rebuttal monograph.
Utterly shameful. If journalism were really a profession, you could
think of tossing people at Fox out of it for betrayal of the public trust.
Instead, all we can really do is just forcefully refute this nonsense at every
opportunity.
 I suppose we can’t really condone the response of Buzz Aldrin. Not
long ago, Bart Sibrel is alleged to have ambushed Aldrin in a public
place, as he often has before, then poked Aldrin with a Bible and dared
him to swear that he had really walked on the Moon. Aldrin chose not
to argue the point, and instead punched Sibrel in the face.
Ahh. Satisfying at a certain level, of course, but was it the right
thing to do? I think that I’ll follow Fox’s lead in this by saying, “Punch­
ing Moon-landing deniers in the face is a controversial subject. Viewers
are invited to make a judgment based on all available information.”
Raelian Clone Fiasco
Let’s turn now to the RaeUans human clone fiasco. This is one of
the biggest, most educational bits of nincompoopery to come along in a
while.
You all know the basic facts by now because 10,000 news stories and
a milUon jokes have been made from them. On December 27,2002, Brigitte
Boisseher, the head of the company Clonaid, gave a press conference in
which she announced that her group had successfully brought about the
birth of the first human clone baby. The alleged clone and her parents
were not present at the press conference; Boisseher said they were in a
secret location to protect their privacy and safety. However, they would be
making themselves available for tests that would substantiate the cloning
claim. Boisseher offered no proof of her statements, but promised proof
would follow within a week. Also onstage during this announcement were
former ABC-TV science correspondent Michael Guillen (who we came
to understand had been covering this amazing story all along and would
mobihze a team of experts to verify the claims) and His Hohness Rael,
the leader of the ahen-worshipping church that had bankrolled
12
the Clonaid project. The Raehans beheve that the human race was
created through cloning by ahens thousands of years ago, and that it is our
destiny to use cloning to help people become immortal.
Needless to say, the story caught fire around the world, bringing
Clonaid and the Raehans the attention they very much desired. However,
even after Clonaid went on to announce that it had cloned more babies, it
never actually brought forward any proof of its claims. People had always
been suspicious of the Clonaid announcement, and that skepticism has
evolved into a widespread opinion that the whole thing was just a sham
meant to pubhcize the Raehans.
Of course, the really good question to start off asking about this story
is. Why did anybody give it credence in the first place? Arthur Caplan, a
bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, pegged it correctly very early
on—he called it “a preposterous announcement by kooks.”
Suppose that 1 myself called the networks and said, “Hello, I’m the
editor in chief of Scientific American, and you should be the first to know
that I’ve created a human clone. He’s in my basement. But he’s very shy,
so no one can see him.” Of course they would hang up. What then was the
credibility of Clonaid and the Raehans? His Hohness Rael, bom Claude
Vorilhon, is a former racing driver who found his vocation as the leader of
a cult; he wears a white jumpsuit and says he was in a UFO. I’m no law­
yer but I don’t think that sounds hke a credible wimess. Brigitte Boisseher,
the head of Clonaid, is a chemist. Chemists don’t have any particularly
relevant knowledge or expertise when it comes to cloning. What made
them credible?
In part, it was the presence of Michael Guillen, a joumahst. His be­
ing at the press conference seemed to suggest that some independent vetting
or verification of the story had already gone on. But Guillen had been
They had announced tagged as soft on pseudoscience in the
years before that past. He had done television reports in which
they were intent on he seemed indulgent to the point of credulous­
cloning a human ness about claims of precognition, about de­
being, and that they vices that produced more energy than they
would be doing it in consumed, about doubts over whether HIV
secret so nobody causes AIDS, about astrology, and other such
could check up on dubious phenomena. But after a few weeks
them. without evidence, even Guillen was remark­
ing to Connie Chung that the Raehan claim
might be just an elaborate hoax.
Here’s my sense of why the media extended so much credibility to
the Raelians. One reason is that Clonaid and the Raelians injected them­
selves into the larger cloning story early. They had armounced years be­
fore that they were intent on cloning a human being, and that they would
be doing it in secret so nobody could check up on them. (Huh.) Here’s
another crucial factor: the Raelians said that they had thousands of people
available to them (members of their cult) who would be willing partici­
pants in cloning experiments. One fact of cloning technology that was
very clear from the pubUshed animal experiments was that cloning is partly
a numbers game. It took more than 270 attempts to clone Dolly the sheep.
Human ova are usually hard to come by, but if you imagined that Clonaid
technicians had enough ova to play with, they just might be able to suc­
ceed before more qualified teams could.
A third factor was that the timing was right, and I mean that in two
respects. All the people involved in human cloning were fearful that some­
body else was about to atmounce it. The scientist Severino Antinori, who
had his own renegade human cloning project, had said back in the spring
14
that he had several pregnancies going and would have a birth late in 2002
or early in 2003. He offered no proof and lots of people wrote this off
almost immediately as an empty promise, but for people who were racing
to be first, it was important as a possible deadline.
Moreover, when the Raelians made their announcement on Decem­
ber 27, in the dead news days right after Christmas, they were virtually
guaranteed the front page of every newspaper in the world. Nobody in the
media wanted to be left behind on this story. The competitive mindset of
most news media suggests that it’s better to be wrong on a story than to be
late with it. Even if it means that you are rushing to report nonsense.
What a sorry episode. Orville Schell, dean of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate
School of Journalism, diagnosed why the media ran with this story as
follows: “This story is a very obvious example of a larger, more worri­
some problem, which is that there are a thousand ways every day in which
the contemporary media doesn’t know how to make the dignified deci­
sion. ... Everybody associated with the media became a little less digni­
fied.”
Global Warming (and Galileo)
Unquestionably, one of the most important, emotionally charged topics
at the intersection of science and public policy for more than the past
decade has been global chmate change. The stakes in making wise choices
on this issue are hterally world-altering. Estimates about how much glo­
bal temperatures might rise over the next century range from less than 2
to as much as 4 degrees Celsius. With the more extreme increase, you
could be looking at sea level changes that might swamp coastal areas
around the world. Even more moderate changes would disrupt traditional
climate patterns essential to estabUshed agricultural economies. Some
15
countries, especially those in already temperate climates, might get better
growing conditions. Most tropical countries, which means most of the
developing world, probably would end up worse off. Conversely, if you
try to head off some of this chmate change by reducing greenhouse gas
emissions, you may be faced with making sweeping changes to industrial
economies, particularly here in the U.S., that could be very costly.
So it’s not a bit surprising that this whole subject makes people very
cantankerous. The science is legitimately complex: we’re still learning
about how Earth’s chmate works and how to model it. The science of
chmate prediction is plagued with huge uncertainties. Nobody is well sat­
isfied with the state of the computer models yet developed. Similarly, the
economic forecasts for the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions or
for faihng to do so are all over the place. There is plenty of room for
reasonable disagreement on the subject of global warming, and anybody
who looks at the technical hterature will find disagreement readily enough.
But here’s the fimny thing. The biggest current disagreements in the
technical hterature tend to be on rather different subjects than those repre­
sented in the global warming debate you’ll find on the evening news.
Much of the popular debate still centers on questions hke: Is the Earth
reaUy getting warmer? If it’s getting warmer, is it really because of any­
thing humans are doing?
An overwhelming majority of chmate investigators were satisfied that
the answers to those questions were “yes” maybe a decade ago. In the
scientific hterature, the debates now are all about the details of how ch­
mate works—for example, about how cloud formations and aerosols can
drive heating and coohng in various ways, or how sensitive heat transport
in the oceans is to atmospheric temperatures.
In other words, the deniers or doubters of global warming are much
16
more heavily represented in the popular media discussions of the subject
than they are in scientific journals. And needless to say, discussions of
global warming science in the popular media tend to be broad, cursory,
undetailed and lacking in all the nuances that appear in scientific papers.
The average citizen could therefore understandably get two distinct but
related impressions. One is that the reahty of global warming is still very
much an unsettled issue for science. The other is that the science support­
ing global warming is so mushy that it doesn’t deserve much credibility.
And you could add a corollary: that anybody who says global warming is
real and scientifically vahdated must be lying, stupid, or pushing some
irrational, doomcrying agenda.
Those are certainly the impressions that skeptics of global warming
would want you to have.
Let me pause for a moment just to make this clear. The fact that most
chmatologists are convinced human activities are helping to raise global
temperatures to a worrisome degree does not mean that they are right.
Majorities of scientists have been wrong about plenty of subjects before,
and although consensus does play a role in establishing scientific “truths,”
it is always possible for one outsider to be right and everybody else in the
establishment to be wrong.
That is, after all, the basis for one of the most famous anecdotes from
the history of science, the story of Galileo’s persecution by the Church.
You’ve all heard it: Galileo made public his astronomical observations of
moons orbiting Jupiter, supporting the Copemican theory that the Earth
was not the center of the universe. The Church took offense at this heresy,
imprisoned him, and forced him to renounce his work on pain of death.
As the defeated GaUleo was led away, he is alleged to have muttered,
“Eppur si muove"—“And yet it moves”—a broken-hearted statement of
 scientific conviction that was eventually vindicated.
It is a great story, so great that it has given rise to another of the
Misguided Myths of Science: the Galileo Myth. I’m well-acquainted with
this myth because every crank in the civilized world sends his wacky theory
to Scientific American, and they all compare themselves to Galileo. In the
minds of these crackpots, the fact that most scientists don’t believe then-
work is itself a kind of proof that they
The Establishment of must be right!
Galileo's time was the It’s probably unnecessary to say
Church, and its "theory" that these people are not Galileo, but
was an axiom of religious understanding why they are wrong
faith. even to make that comparison is use­
ful in weighing the strengths and
weaknesses of maverick points of view on science today.
In the case of the real Galileo, it’s not that he was one little man with
a theory who went head-to-head with the big, bad Scientific Establish­
ment and its theory. The Establishment of Galileo’s time was the Church,
and its “theory” was an axiom of religious faith. There were centuries of
scholarship associated with the geocentric theory, but that wasn’t science
as we know it, because science as we know it barely existed. Galileo was
helping to invent empirical science.
And GaUleo didn’t have just a theory. He had a set of reproducible
observations that couldn’t be explained easily by some modification of
the geocentric theory. What made Galileo’s work so revolutionary was
not just that it invalidated the geocentric explanation for the universe, but
that it made it impossible to dismiss any longer the Copemican theory,
which explained everything more elegantly. In effect, GaUleo wasn’t just
saying that the Church was wrong; he was offering proof that something
else was right.
So with the Galileo Myth in mind, let’s go back to the subject of
global warming. Let’s consider why some of the offered disproofs of glo­
bal warming don’t seriously shake the scientific consensus that it’s hap­
pening.
Remember, I’m not trying to convince you of what’s right or wrong
about global warming. What I’m trying to do is recap the scientific
community’s response to these arguments.
Sometimes the global warming skeptics point out how inaccurate,
even ridiculously inaccurate, the warming models seem to be. Those are
vaUd criticisms, but since cUmate researchers know that their models need
lots of additional correction and refinement, merely showing that the
models still aren’t great doesn’t have much effect.
Sometimes skeptics will pound away on the fundamental reasoning
that supports the global warming models, to make them sound wrong a
priori. For example, it’s common for doubters to point out that volcanoes
throw vastly more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere than
the human race does, so how could our puny pollutants be changing the
environment significantly? The answer from the global warming camp is
that volcanoes release huge amounts of these gases over a very short pe­
riod, whereas the human contributions are small but steady. The data and
the models suggest that slow, steady forcing of the climate is what we’re
seeing.
The global wanning doubters will sometimes point to specific mod­
eling studies that don’t show warming effects, or show warming effects
so minor as to be unimportant. Fair enough. But unless the doubters offer
convincing reasons that those climate studies are more likely to be conect
19
 ably be left thinking, “Well, both sides have good points. I guess I’ll be-
than all the others supporting global wanning are, then those isolated stud­
heve what I want.”
ies can always be shrugged off as anomalies.
I’m sorry to say that educating the pubUc on the global warming de­
The most persuasive thing that global warming skeptics could do to
bate has also not been helped by certain biased factoids that make the
win over more scientists is to follow Gahleo’s lead; offer not just empiri­
rounds. How many of you have ever heard about the petition signed by
cal evidence against anthropogenic global warming but some alternative
17,000 scientists all saying that they were skeptical of global warming?
model to explain the facts. And some of them have tried to do that. For
This petition isn’t a myth, it really exists: the Oregon Institute of Science
example, a number of skeptics have suggested that the observed global
and Medicine circulated it in 1998. If petitions with lots of names impress
warming isn’t caused by human greenhouse gases but by variations in
you, it’s understandable why you’d think the scientific consensus in favor
solar activity. After all, it’s very likely that variations in solar activity had
of global warming is media hooey.
a lot to do with the Ice Ages and other big cUmate fluctuations that pre­
But if you check into that petition a little more closely, it smells hke
ceded industrial society.
a flatbed of mackerel on warm summer day. That petition arose from a
That sounds like a pretty good explanation; it has both empirical ob­
mass-mailing from a group of global warming skeptics to tens of thou­
servations and a gut-level commonsense going for it. So why hasn’t the
sands of American scientists. The petition was accompanied by a re­
climate community embraced it more widely? The problem with this
search paper claiming that global warming would be beneficial to man­
theory. I’m told, is that its logic starts to break down when you get into the
kind, seemingly taken from the journal Proceedings ofthe National Acad­
details. That is, you can build atmospheric climate models that incorpo­
emy of Science. Except that the paper had never been pubUshed at all; it
rate fluctuations of solar energy. But for the observed increases in solar
had just been typeset to look like a Proceedings paper. So already the
activity to cause anything like the heating that’s been seen, you have to
petition’s origins are suspicious. Of those 17,000 signers, only 1,400 of
make the atmospheric models so sensitive that the solar effects would still
them claimed to have doctorates in a chmate-related science—^the rest
be overwhelmed by much larger greenhouse gas effects.
were chemists, theoretical physicists, astronomers, botanists, and others
And so on and so on. I’m not going to try to play out the entire global
who were no better credentialed to offer an opinion on climate research
warming war as a one-man show. But returning to my larger point about
than I am. In 2001, Scientific American randomly tried to contact 30 of
how issues like global warming are covered, I think that the media rarely
those 1,400 climate scientists and reached 21 of them. Of those 21, 11
convey the actual state of the scientific debate very well. Instead, they get
said they still agreed with the petition, although 8 of them noted that they
sidetracked onto a dispute that, scientifically, is marginal nowadays. And
had signed based on an informal understanding of the evidence. Six of the
even that debate is one in which the press is usually content to say, “Here’s
21 said they would not still sign the petition, three didn’t remember the
one side, here’s the other,” all very evenhandedly, but leaving the audi­
ence rather less informed than it could be. The audience can understand­

20 21
 petition, and one had died. So if you very crudely extrapolated from those
results, of the 17,000 names on the petition, only 200 were climate re­
searchers who still supported it. Two hundred is a respectable number of
scientists, but it is only a tiny fraction of the climate community.
In short, that petition, which was widely pubUcized in the media and
praised by Nebraska Senator Chuck Nagel, takes us into the area of rather
duplicitous repackagings of science fact.
The Skeptical Environmentalist
If we’re going to talk about carefully packaged distortions of sci­
ence, then I really have to talk about a book that became famous (or noto­
rious) about a year and a half ago, Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Envi­
ronmentalist, because in my opinion it is a masterpiece of this deplorable
genre. But for that very reason, it’s an excellent choice for looking at how
the media can miseducate the public about science—and what’s more,
how mythmaking in the media can make matters worse.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I and Scientific Ameri­
can now have something of a history with Bjorn Lomborg and The Skep­
tical Environmentalist, as I shall momentarily explain. Please feel free to
consider me as less than a disinterested party at this point, and be suspi­
cious of my comments as you wish. Heaven knows others have.
Several years ago Bjorn Lomborg was an associate professor in the
department of political science at the University of Aarhus in Denmark
and, as he tells it, a confirmed environmentahst with the Greenpeace mem­
bership to prove it. One day he and his students set out to refute certain
arguments that economists made about the growing availability and fall­
ing costs of different resources—arguments that contradicted standard
environmentist positions. Much to Lomberg’s surprise, he says, when
22
they researched the issue it became clear that the economists were clearly
right and the environmentalists were clearly wrong. What’s more, as
Lomborg’s team worked through the literature on global warming,
biodiversity, overpopulation, energy, and
so on, it became clear that the environ-
mentaUsts were basically wrong about By almost every
everything. By almost every available available measure,
measure, according to Lomborg, the sci­ according to Lomborg,
the scientific evidence
entific evidence showed that the “real
state of the world” was getting better and showed that the "real
better. The reason this scientifically vaU- state of the world" was
dated truth wasn’t getting out to the pub- getting better and
hc, however, was that a pessimistic and better.
dishonest cabal of environmental activ­
ists and the media were spreading a “Utany” of doom.
That’s the story that Lomborg tells in The Skeptical Environmental­
ist, and it’s a powerful one. It’s got good news, and drama, and villains,
and even a hero in the person of Lomborg, the Green Who Learned the
Truth. Basically, it is Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale about The
Emperor’s New Clothes (and how fitting that Lomborg, like Anderson, is
Danish). Not surprisingly, the book was championed by pro-business/
antienvironmental right-wing interests, but it also got glowing marks in
mainstream centrist media. The Economist wrote an editorial praising it
and gave Lomborg three pages of essay space to reiterate his argument.
The Washington Post gave the book an enthusiastic review. The New York
Times wrote a front-page story even before the book was pubhshed, prais­
ing it for forcing a reassessment of environmental issues.
23
 There was just one problem with The Skeptical Environmentalist. The
scientific community insisted that Lomborg had the science wrong. Re­
views of the book that appeared in the premiere journals Science and Nature
and many others all said the same thing: Lomborg was misrepresenting
the state of scientific knowledge. The Skeptical Environmentalist posed
as a dispassionate, objective assessment of the scientific results, but
Lomborg was citing research results selectively, and always with a bias
against the environmental position. His commentary at times showed a
misunderstanding of the basic science involved, and his interpretations of
the research were off the mark.
What were Lomborg’s responses to these criticisms? That the scien­
tists didn’t understand their own fields. That they were writing to protect
their own reputations and grant money. That they were, in short, not hon­
est scientists but environmental activists who couldn’t be trusted.
Thank heavens we have Lomborg to save science from the scientists.
There are plenty of people who would disagree with my assessment
of Lomborg and the merits of his argument. I’ve heard from lots of them,
in bitter, denunciative letters and e-mails and articles. Scientific American
and I became lighting rods for a lot of that criticism because in January
2002 we published an extensive rebuttal to The Skeptical Environmental­
ist from research leaders in cUmate, energy, population, and biodiversity,
pointing out in some detail how his argument went wrong. A lot of
Lomborg’s fans, including some in the media like the editors of The Econo­
mist, took offense at what they saw as us being unfair to Lomborg.
But my challenge to all of those critics is to disprove what I’ve said
today: that Lomborg claims his book is an honest analysis of the best
scientific evidence on the environment, and that the scientific community
has overwhelmingly rejected Lomborg’s book as wrong on the science.
24
Here we have Lomborg, a man with a background in statistics and
political science but, according to his own statements, with no prior ex­
pertise in climatology, biology, or any other natural science. He spends
two years—just two years—going through the mountains of literature on
climate change, on ecology and extinction, on population growth, on ag­
riculture, on forestry, on energy, on air pollution, on acid rain, and on the
role of industrial pollutants in cancer. And after allegedly identifying and
reanalyzing the best of the data in all those fields, Lomborg determines
that the conclusions reached by most of the scientists in all those fields,
who have devoted their whole careers to their specialty, are wrong.
Why should that sound credible?
I think part of its appeal rests with another of those Misguided Myths:
The Myth of the Unschooled Outsider. It’s the idea that specialists in a
scientific field are deeply entrenched in what philosopher Thomas Kuhn
called the estabhshed “paradigm” or framework for understanding their
work, and that real progress only comes when somebody can overthrow
that paradigm—probably an outsider to the field. There are some good
examples of that phenomenon. Biologist Lynn Margulis has done a won­
derful job, I think, of demonstrating that a cultural tendency to under­
stand natural selection in terms of competition and “survival of the fit­
test” for a long time blinded biologists to the evolutionary power of sym­
biosis and cooperation. On the other hand, I can’t tell you how many
manuscripts I’ve received from cranks who explain that they have been
able to figure out how Einstein’s relativity work is all wrong precisely
because they haven’t studied physics, and therefore don’t make the mis­
takes that those silly brainwashed physicists do.
Hmm, yes. I only hope that if I eventually need surgery, my surgeon
isn’t a doctor whose head is packed full of nonsense from medical school.
25
I’m praying for a good plumber who can work out how to do my qua­
druple bypass from first principles while I’m on the table.
So that’s a broad reason why I question whether Lomborg makes
sense. Maybe I’m naive, but fundamentally my prejudice, subject to rea­
soned argument, is to think that scientists tend to understand the science
better than nonscientists do.
What about more specific examples of what’s wrong with Lomborg?
After all, I haven’t proved anything by what I’ve said; I’ve just given
general reasons to be skeptical. There’s no way I can do a balanced pre­
sentation of all this, and people who already disagree with my take on
Lomborg wouldn’t trust me to. I’ll say that if you’re very interested in this
subject, you can go to Lomborg’s web site and to the Scientific American
web site and countless others and read all about the controversies to form
your own opinion.
I do want to make one further comment about the book as a distortion
of science. In all of Lomborg’s rebuttals to his critics, he Ukes to make the
point that they almost never point to any errors in his book. And strictly
speaking, there are only rare instances in which Lomborg ever misstates a
number from the literature, or miscalculates something, or literally mis­
quotes a source. So Lomborg is light that his book doesn’t contain er­
rors—^but that is a red herring, because errors aren’t primarily what he’s
being criticized for. He’s criticized for selectively quoting from major
studies where it supports his thesis, but then ignoring parts of the same
papers that contradict it. He’s criticized for citing figures from major in­
ternational studies that work for his argument, but ignoring the fact that
later studies discredited those figures. He’s criticized for picking and choos­
ing studies that he likes, and ignoring a larger number of studies that he
doesn’t.
26
Suppose that Roger Ebert reviews a movie by writing, “It is such an
awe-inspiring disaster of incompetent film-making that I couldn’t take
my eyes off the screen in disbelief!” If I as that film’s promoter then put
together an ad that says, “Roger Ebert called it ‘Awe-inspiring... I couldn’t
take my eyes off the screen!’,” then you couldn’t point to any errors in
what I did either. That doesn’t mean there’s a particle of truth to what I
wrote.
Picking and choosing what you like is not the way that good science
and scientists work. That’s the way you write a polemic, not a scientific
paper. And it’s because The Skeptical Environmentalist pretends to be a
work of science when it’s not that I consider it dishonest.
“Scientific” Creationism
Let’s move on to what I consider to be the premiere example of
pseudoscientific nincompoopery of our time. Because this has it all: un­
scientific assertions, antiscientific attitudes, mumbo-jumbo monstrosities
of fake science, outright lies, and careful packagings of select real science
used to prop up ideas that can’t fit within the framework of science at all.
I am speaking, of course, of the Queen Mother of Crazy Ideas: Scientific
Creationism.
I say “scientific creationism” because it’s important to make a dis­
tinction. As an article of their religious faith, many people believe that
God made the world and human beings. I have no complaint with that. If
somebody tells me that he believes literally in the Genesis account of
creation, and that he knows scientists disagree but that he thinks the sci­
ence is just wrong, I will shake his hand, salute his reUgious conviction,
and go my own way. I may think there are some theological challenges
that go with that position, but that’s somebody else’s problem. It is
27
not the job of science to shatter people’s reUgious faith. I don’t personally
beheve in it, but I have no problem with reUgious creationism.
What I object to is creationism dressed up as a sham science. I object
to the attitude that if there’s a conflict between reUgion and science, the
science must be wrong on scientific
terms. I deplore scientific creationism, I object to the
first, because it is a corrupting assault attitude that if
against science, but second, because it is there's a conflict
an even worse insult to reUgious faith. It between religion
impUes that you can’t really beUeve in and science, the
God unless science says that it’s okay. science must be
wrong on scientific
Having said all that, let’s consider
some of the specific arguments that these terms.
“scientific” creationists muster.
Sometimes they Uke to start by asserting, “Evolution is just a theory.
It isn’t a fact, because nobody was around to witness people evolving
from animals or anything else. And if there were really strong evidence
for evolution, then it would be the Law of Evolution, not just the Theory
of Evolution.”
Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the
middle of a hierarchy of certainty—above a mere hypothesis but below a
law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the
National Academy of Science, a scientific theory is “a well-substantiated
explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts,
laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.” No amount of vaUdation changes
a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generaUzation about nature. So
when scientists talk about the theory of evolution—or the atomic theory
or the theory of relativity, for that matter—they are not expressing mis­
givings or uncertainty about its truth.
28
In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent
with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS
defines a fact as “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and
for all practical purposes is accepted as ‘true.’” The fossil record and abim-
dant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time.
Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is
clear, unambiguous and compelling. All sciences frequently rely on indi­
rect evidence. Physicists can’t see subatomic particles directly, for in­
stance, so they look for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud
chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists’
conclusions less certain.
Sometimes the anti-evolutionists will argue, “But more scientists doubt
the truth of evolution all the time.” Nonsense. Oh, I don’t doubt that these
creationists can point to growth in their own ranks, including some who
are at least nominally scientists. Maybe there really are more “scientific
creationists” today than ever before. Yet no evidence suggests that evolu­
tion is losing adherents more widely among scientists. I’ve never seen any
poll that indicates evolution is less widely accepted today among biolo­
gists—or other scientists—^than it used to be. Pick up any issue of the
peer-reviewed biological literature and you will find articles that support
and elaborate on evolutionary studies or that accept evolution as a cmcial
principle.
Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all
but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George Gilchrist of the University of
Washington and Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University
independently surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature.
29
seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those
hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, they found none. Similarly, in
2002, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University reported that
he’d conducted a similar search and it too was fruitless.
Creationists retort, predictably, that a close-minded scientific com­
munity rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors at Nature, Sci­
ence, and other leading journals, few anti-evolution manuscripts are even
submitted. Some anti-evolution authors have published in serious jour­
nals. Their papers, however, rarely attack evolution or advance creationist
arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved
and difficult (which no one disputes). In short, creationists are not giving
the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.
One of the most nonsensical of the creationist arguments is that evo­
lution is thermodynamically impossible. The Second Law of Thermody­
namics says that systems must become more disordered over time. There­
fore, say the creationists, living cells could not have arisen from inani­
mate chemicals, and multicellular fife could not have evolved from proto­
zoa.
Clearly, they badly misunderstand the Second Law. If their argument
were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible
because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from
disordered parts.
The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed,
isolated system (one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) must in­
crease or stay the same. Entropy is a physical concept often casually de­
scribed as disorder, but it differs from the conversational use of the word
in significant ways. More important, however, the Second Law permits
parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience
30
an offsetting increase. Thus, the earth as a whole can grow more complex
because the Sun pours heat and fight onto it, and the entropy rise associ­
ated with the sun’s nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. On
Earth, particular niches can nurture fife because other niches become even
less hospitable. And simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complex­
ity by consuming other fife and simpler materials.
But these days, the most prominent, sophisticated, and insidious ar­
guments that the creationists use fall into the category of “Intelligent De­
sign” Theories. These theories take a number of forms, but fundamentally
they boil down to this argument: At the anatomical, cellular, and molecu­
lar levels, living things display fantastically intricate features. These fea­
tures could not function at all if they were any less complicated or sophis­
ticated, which makes it hard to picture how they could have evolved from
simple predecessors. And in some cases, their complexity is such that it
could not have evolved naturally without some guiding influence. The
only prudent conclusion is that living things are the products of intelli­
gent design, not evolution.
Students of science history may recognize this fine of thought as a
new variation on an old theme, the “argument from design,” one of the
oldest ways of trying to refute evolution. In 1802 the theologian William
Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable
conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it
there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things
must be handiworks of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin
of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of se­
lection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution
of ornate organic structures.
31
 Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the of its pieces were missing, and whose pieces have no value except as parts
example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye’s of the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the
ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion that
these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional operates like an outboard motor. The proteins making up a flagellum are
forms needed during the eye’s uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal joint, and other
evolution—^what good is half an structures like those a human engineer would specify. The possibility that
Today's "intelligent this intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is
eye? Anticipating just this criti­
design" advocates are virtually nil, Behe argues, which bespeaks intelligent design. He makes
cism, Darwin suggested in Ori­
more sophisticated than similar points about the blood’s clotting mechanism and other molecular
gin that even “incomplete” eyes
their predecessors, but systems.
might confer some benefits
their arguments and Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First,
(such as helping creatures ori­
goals are not fundamen­ some bacteria do have simpler flagellums than the one that Behe cites, so
ent toward light) and thereby
tally different. not all those components have to be present for a flagellum to work. And
survive for further evolutionary
refinement. Biology has vindi­ as Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others have described, the
cated Darwin: researchers have identified more primitive eyes and hght- sophisticated flagellum components all have precedents elsewhere in na­
sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom, and have even tracked ture. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an or­
the evolutionary history of eyes through their genetics (it now appears ganelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject
that in various famiUes of organisms, eyes have evolved independently on toxins into other cells.
several different occasions). The key point is that the flagellum’s component structures can serve
Today’s “intelUgent design” advocates are more sophisticated than functions other than propulsion that would have helped favor their evolu­
their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally tion in the first place. The final evolution of the flagellum might then have
different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could involved only the novel recombination of sophisticated parts from other
not account for Ufe as we know it, and then suggesting that the only ten­ stractures.
able alternative is that life was designed by some unidentified intelligence. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the modifica­
“Irreducible complexity” is the battle cry of Michael Behe of Lehigh tion and elaboration of many proteins that were originally used in diges­
University, the author of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Chal­ tion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of CaU-
lenge to Evolution. As a household example of irreducible complexity, fomia at San Diego. So some of the complexity that Behe calls proof of
Behe points to the mousetrap—a machine that could not function if any intelligent design is not irreducible at all.

33
 Even aside from weaknesses in the technical arguments of the intel-
hgent design camp, their ideas have a philosophical weakness: they are
all disasters as science. Intelhgent design theorists invoke shadowy enti­
ties that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abiUties are needed to
solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expand scientific inquiry, such
answers shut it down. After all, how can anyone disprove the existence of
omnipotent intelhgences?
Intelhgent design pretends to offer answers, but it really doesn’t offer
any. For instance, when and how did a designing intelhgence intervene in
life’s history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human?
Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Intelhgent design
theorists usually don’t hke to be pinned down on these points. Instead,
they pursue argument by exclusion—they behttle evolutionary explana-
hons as far-fetched or incomplete, and then imply that only design-based
alternatives remain.
Logically, this is misleading. Even if one naturahstic explanation is
flawed, it doesn’t imply that all are. Moreover, it doesn’t make one design
theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill
in the blanks for themselves, and some will do so by substituting rehgious
behefs or crackpot fantasies for scientific ideas.
Conclusion
Does it really do any harm if people beheve these crazy, unscienhfic
ideas? Yes. The pubhc and lawmakers need a clear understanding of envi­
ronmental issues if they are to set wise pohcies in response to global warm­
ing, pollution, species loss, and so on. Both the environment and the
economy hang in the balance. Creationism masquerading as science in
classrooms can erode the quahty of rational, critical thinking that we’re
34
supposed to be passing on to our children. People being hoodwinked by
psychics are throwing away their money and faiUng to find real emotional
closure for the grief they feel.
Still, don’t the controversies and dubious standing of a lot of these
issues get exposed most of the time anyway? In most cases, no, not very
well.
Forget, for the moment, the Moon Landing Hoax or the psychic TV
shows, which feed people almost unanswered distortions of reaUty. Let’s
write them off as flukes, or as entertaiiunents that people don’t really
believe. Let’s just consider the unscientific ideas and views that do get
taken more seriously by the public as real, controversial alternatives to
mainstream science.
In most media, short, superficial treatments of these pseudo-contro­
versies usually don’t permit getting into much detail about the weight of
evidence on each side. The pursuit of being “fair and balanced” some­
times reduces the discussion to “he said, she said,” avoiding an opinion or
assessment. Thus, they give the impression that there is a real controversy
among scientific equals when there isn’t. That type of coverage benefits
nonsensical ideas because they then get exposure and equal treatment that
helps them recruit new behevers.
It’s a difficult, troubhng challenge for journalists to get at the truth,
and not just be passive conduits for ideas. Often, of course, journalists
shouldn’t pick a dog in the fights they cover. But when it comes down to
a dispute between science and nonscience, I don’t think joumahsts really
have a choice.
Journalism is rooted in conveying facts, reality, the truth. It has a
bedrock responsibiUty to test whether what it represents to be a “story” is
meaningfully consistent with facts and reality. In that respect, joumaUsm
35
 has a lot in common with science. And like science, ifjoumaUsm is guided
by an honest dedication to using critical thought and reason to help get at
the truth, to naysay the nonsense, then we all benefit.
 Previous Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures
are available in booklet form.
Advisory Committee for the Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures For a copy, contact the School of Journalism and Electronic Media,
University of Tennessee.
June Adamson, Professor Emerita of Journalism
Paul Ashdown, Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media
C. Edward Caudill, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research; Professor of 1989 John Noble Wilford
Journalism and Electronic Media Science as Exploration
George Everett, Professor Emeritus of Journalism
James A. Crook, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the School of Journalism 1991 Dorothy Nelkin
Faye Julian, Interim Dean of the College of Communication and Information Risk Communication and the Mass Media
Kelly Leiter, Meeman Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the College of
Communications 1993 Gina Kolata
Mark Littmann, Professor, Julia G. & Alfred G. Hill Chair of Excellence in Science Medical Reporting: Where the Story Ides
Writing
M. Mark Miller, Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media
1994 Victor Cohn
Bonnie Riechert, Assistant Professor of Advertising and Public Relations
David Lee Smith, Director and Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Reporting—Good and Bad—on Health in America
Electronic Media
Richard Smyser, Founding Editor of The Oak Ridger and former Meeman Professor 1996 Jim Detjen
of Journalism Environmental News: Where Is It Going?
Dwight Teeter, Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media; former Dean of the
College of Communications 1997 Jon Franklin
John Noble Wilford, Science Correspondent and Senior Writer, New York Times The End of Science Writing

1999 Robert Kanigel

The Perils of Popularizing Science

2000 John Noble WUford

Science Journalism Across Two Centuries
8^
I Special Thanks 2001 Sharon Begley
Why Science Journalism Isn’t Science
The School of Journalism and Electronic Media is deeply grateful to:
Society for Technical Communication, East Tennessee Chapter 2002 David Quammen
Midnight in the Garden of Fact and Factoid
Society of Professional Journalists, East Tennessee Chapter
for additional support of this Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture. 2003 John Rennie
Naysaying the Nincompoops:
On Being a Maven in a Misinformed Era
Paula
Apsell
What’s Hot,
What’s Not
in Science
Programming
Twelfth Alfred & Julia Hill Lecture on
Science, Society, and the Mass Media
March 29, 2004

School of Journalism and Electronic Media

College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science, society, and the mass media
was established in 1989 by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.

Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949, seven years after the govern­
ment established Oak Ridge to house workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak
Ridger was the first successful privately owned newspaper in the city and marked
an important stage in the transition of Oak Ridge from federal operation to private
ownership and self-government.
Paula
Apsell
Published by
School of Journalism and Electronic Media
College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee
Whafs Hot,
Serial Editor: Mark Littmann
V\Aiat’s Not
Julia G. and Alfred G. Hill Professor of Science,
Technology, and Medical Writing in Soienoe
Serial Designer: Eric L. Smith
Lecturer and Assistant Director, Department of
Student Publications
Rogramming
Twelfth Alfred & Julia Hill Lecture on
Serial Design Consultant: Robert Heller
Associate Professor Science, Society, and the Mass Media
March 29, 2004

School of Journalism and Electronic Media

College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee

What’s Hot, What’s Not in Science Programming

© 2004 Paula Apsell

Publication Authorization Number ROl-2910-057-001-06


Paula Apsell got her start in broadcasting at WGBH Boston, where
she was hired fresh out of Brandeis University to type the daily television
program logs - a job she notes is now, mercifully, automated. Within a
year, Apsell found her way to WGBH Radio, where she developed the
award-winning children’s drama series The Spider’s Web, and later became
a radio news producer. But her real interest lay in television and science.
In 1975, she joined a fledgling WGBH series that would set the standard
for science programming on television: Nova.
Apsell produced a number of critically acclaimed Nova episodes
before joining Dr. Timothy Johnson at WCVB, the ABC affiliate in Boston,
as senior producer for medical programming. She returned to WGBH in
II
1984 to become executive producer of Nova, guiding the series into
today’s highly competitive multimedia environment. In addition to the
programs in the regular Nova television schedule, Apsell has overseen the
production of many WGBH Science Unit specials, including A Science
Odyssey, Secrets ofLost Empires, Building Big, the miniseries Evolution, and
the Emmy Award-winning Bioterror. She has also directed Nova’s diversi­
fication into other media, most notably its award-winning website. As
executive in charge of Nova’s large-format film unit, Apsell has overseen
the production of Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, To the Limit,
Stormchasers, Island of the Sharks, and Special Effects, the first Imax film
ever to be nominated for an Academy Award. Nova’s season for fall 2003
included the miniseries The Elegant Universe and Mars Dead or Alive
(which climaxed as the Rover Spirit landed successfully on Mars).
Today, Nova is the most popular science series on American tele­
vision and on the web. In 1998, the National Science Board of the
National Science Foundation awarded Nova its first-ever Public Service
Award. Nova has won every major broadcasting award. In May 2003,
Nova won three more Emmy Awards for documentaries. Apsell has
received numerous individual awards, among them the 1994 Bradford
Washburn Award from the Museum of Science, Boston; the 1996 Garl
Sagan Award given by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents; and, in
1999, the American Institute of Physics’ Andrew Gemant Award.
Paula Apsell lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband and two
daughters.
Ill
 With the advent of cable in the father of the pharaoh of Exodus

What’s Hot, mid-‘80s, the broadcast environ­

ment totally changed. Instead of 4
fame. Even so, there’s no denying
that many of these topics belong in

What’s Not ____ networks, there were soon 40 or

more. And now, with digital cable,
yet a fourth category: TRSH - for
transparent ratings-seeking hype -

in Soienoe Paula Apsell

there are some 300.
Does anyone want to
and also no denying that if we in
public television put on programs
watch an uninterrupted hour of just for ratings, we’re side-stepping
Programming science in this brave new channel-
surfing world? Our research tells us
our mission. We need to do what
very few others will do, that is, real
As the saying goes, no one has ever lost money underesti­ that the single most important fac­ science - genomics, cosmology,
mating the taste of the American public. That works in spades for tor in attracting an audience is string theory . . . We need to pro­
topic. And it’s sadly predictable mote science literacy, going where
the television industry, where networks, cable channels, and local
which topics work best. We’ve even other broadcasters fear to tread.
broadcasters have been racing down market at velocities seemingly
put them in categories. For exam­ Why are we so committed
approaching the speed of light. And science is not exempt from this ple, there’s Boys and Their Toys - to science literacy? Well, as you
ratings race. It has even generated its own genre: weather porn. Not that’s jet fighters, lost airplanes, and may be aware, its level in the United
to mention monsters of the deep, alien abductions, angels, ghosts - random military hardware. There’s States remains low. Really low. So
all of which pass for science in the feeding frenzy that characterizes Old Bones - that’s dinosaurs and low that surveys are continually
broadcast television today. human origins. And there’s coming up with shocking new sta­
Weather Porn, the one I already tistics. I’ll be citing a few of these in
This month. Nova cele­ nostalgic for the olden days, in the mentioned. That’s loving depic­ a moment. But first, let’s hear from
brated its 30^^ birthday, and 30 early 1970s, when Michael tions of tornadoes, tsunamis, and a real expert on the subject, namely
years is an eternity in television. Ambrosino started Nova amid other lethal events. Jay Leno.
My daughter would be pleased to almost universal skepticism that joking aside, some of these
know that General Hospital still has any red-blooded American would topics can be worth doing. “Joint
a safe lead: it went on 40 years ago. watch a science show on television. Strike Fighter,” for example, a Nova
But Nova has outlasted Seinfeld, I Science was for school. But Michael episode about the race to develop
Love Lucy, M*A*S*H, Hill Street brought a new approach. He the next generation of fighter jet,
Blues, and CBS Reports. believed that science is a story and, was both popular and important.
Not that we haven’t had if told with visual flair and strong As will be our upcoming mummy
our crises. In fact, with the intense characters, people would watch. program. The mummy in question
competition for eyeballs in the tele­ And they did. Nova was a success turned up in a museum in Niagara
vision industry, it feels as if every right out of the box. Falls, and then, according to the
moment is a crisis. It makes me But nothing stays simple. archeologists, turned out to be a
king, perhaps Ramses I, the grand­

1 2
JAYLENO: You know, a recent survey by the National
(Lena has moved down the street.)
Science Foundation found that the average
LEND (to MAN 1); Where do the Moon and stars go in the
American, when tested on their knowledge
daytime? No looking up for the answer.
of basic science, answered correctly only
Sir, I saw you look up. No, no, no.
55% of the time.

LEND (to WOMAN 1); How long does it take the Earth to go around the
Now, we at The Tonight Show thought that
Sun?
was way too high. No, no, we talk to peo­
ple every day. It’s not half of America; it’s a
WOMAN 1: Twenty-four hours.
lot less than that.

LENO: The Earth goes around the Sun in 24 hours?

So we took our cameras, we went down to
City Walk at Universal Studios. We just
WOMAN 1; Yeah, I went to the planetarium. I know that’s
picked people out of the crowd, asked
what it is.
them simple, basic questions.

LENO (to MAN 2): How long does it take the Earth to go around
What controls the tides, folks?
the Sun?

AUDIENCE: The Moon.

MAN 2: Twenty-four hours? Three hundred and sixty
degrees?
LEND: That seems easy, doesn’t it? What is a
homo sapienst A person. Aren’t these
LENO: Three hundred and sixty degrees? It goes for 24
some easy questions?
hours at 360 degrees?

(Lena is now on the street.)

LENO (to MAN 3): How many cells does a single-celled creature have?

LEND: Rachel, where are you from?

MANS; Oh, what, like 36?

RACHEL; Jericho, Long Island.

LENO: Thirty-six cells?

LEND; Did you go to Jericho High School?

MANS: Something like that.

RACHEL: Oh yeah.
LENO (to WOMAN 1): How many cells does a single-celled creature have?
Think about it.
LEND: Is it a good school?

WOMAN 1: One. No, I’m kidding. I don’t know, darling.

RACHEL; Amazing. I was valedictorian.

LENO (to MAN 4): What causes the tides?

LEND; You were valedictorian? Wow.

MAN 4: Wind?
RACHEL: Yeah.

LENO (to MAN 1); What causes the tides?

LEND; Let’s see how you do. How many moons does
the Earth have?
MAN1; Boats?

RACHEL: How many moons does the Earth have?

LENO (to WOMAN 2): What causes the tides?
I’d guess eight.

WOMAN 2: Fish?
LEND: Eight moons?

4
LEND: Fish? Fish?
LENO (to MAN 1): What causes low tide?
MAN 1: Not enough water.
LENO: Not enough water? I see. So where does
the water go?
MAN1: That’s when people drink it out of the faucet.
LENO: They drink it out of the faucet. That’s when you
have low tide.
Jay’s survey may draw dedication to cutting edge scientif­
laughs, but the reality of the situa­ ic ideas - the ones that change the
tion is hardly funny. The Earth way we see ourselves and the world
goes around the Sun once a year - around us - and at the same time
it’s hard to think of a more basic be entertaining. People watch tele­
scientific fact. Yet one out of every vision voluntarily. We’d like to tie
two Americans doesn’t know it. them to their chairs Tuesdays at 8
Likewise, one-half or fewer of o’clock, but we can’t. We have to
Americans know that electrons are entice them with good stories that
smaller than atoms or that the ear­ they can understand without a
liest humans did not live at the Ph.D. Striking the right balance
same time as dinosaurs. A National between education and entertain­
Science Foundation survey tells us ment is the essence of what we do.
that most Americans learn about Occasionally, what we do
science from television. I don’t works so well that a young viewer
know if that’s the problem or the actually goes into the sciences, or
solution, but it does make our engineering, as a result of watching
unique public television mission all our programs. Career counseling is
spell it out, a government survey
recently showed that minorities
make up only 3 percent of the sci­
ence and engineering workforce,
women only 15 percent. Which is
no doubt the result of many fac­
tors, but is certainly due, at least in
part, to a scarcity of role models.
After all, when no one like you has
done something, that something
will seem daunting indeed.
And that’s where Nova can
really make a difference. Right
now, for example, we’re working on
the first TV profile ever of one of
the leading American chemists of
the 20^^ century, an African-
American named Percy Julian. And
last year, we devoted an hour to
exposing the massive injustice per­
petrated against a female scientist
who should have long ago taken
her place in the history books.
As you probably know,
James Watson, Francis Crick, and
Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel
NARRATOR: As World War II comes to an end, scientists discover
the secret of the atom, unieashing death and
Prize for discovering the structure
of DNA, the master molecule of
life. And you may also “know,” if
you read Watson’s famous book
The Double Helix, that their work
was plagued by an inexplicably
hostile female colleague, who
dressed badly and never wore lip­
stick. They got the Nobel. She got
insults. But the truth is that
Rosalind Franklin deserved equal
billing with the guys, as we show in
a Nova called The Secret of Photo
51, which aired last year on the 50^^
anniversary of the DNA discovery.
Franklin was an X-ray
crystallographer, a physicist who
had mastered what was, in the early
1950s, the very tricky business of
taking X-ray photographs of
extremely tiny objects and then
mathematically analyzing them to
reveal their three-dimensional
form. Her picture of DNA rocked
the world, as you will see in this
introductory clip.

the more important. For in com­
mercial television, the bottom line
is almost always the bottom line. If
boosting ratings means stooping to
sensationalism and pseudoscience,
so be it.
The main question for us
at Nova, then, is how to retain our
not our primary goal, to be sure.
But we’re delighted when we can
produce a result of this magnitude,
and particularly happy when we
can inspire women and members
of minority groups, who, as you
probably know, are underrepre­
sented in many technical fields. To
destruction on an unimaginabie scale. Now they are
racing to discover the secret of life.
It will be the find of the century. It’s May 1,1952,
and what these scientists gathered at the Royal
Society don’t know is, at this very moment, close by
in a London lab, an X-ray camera is clicking off a
100-hour exposure of something calied “DNA.”

5 6
 When developed, this photograph will reveal the
structure of DNA and the key to understanding how
the blueprint for all life on Earth is passed down
from generation to generation.
Two of the most determined of the DNA detectives
are Francis Crick and an American, James Watson.
Also at the Royal Society is a 31 -year-old British sci­
entist named Rosalind Franklin. She is responsible
for the crucial X-ray photo.
As Watson, Crick, and their colleague Maurice
Wilkins strive to solve the puzzle of DNA, Franklin’s
work will pave the way. Without her knowledge, they
will gain access to her findings and her remarkable
X-ray image of DNA. It will lead to one of the great­
est discoveries in science, and, some believe, to one
of its greatest injustices.
I mentioned a few minutes ago that ing, we whose business it is to bring
one of the few shows to have sur­ you their stories know they are any­
vived longer than Nova is General thing but. They are real, quirky,
Hospital. That’s no coincidence. sympathetic - individuals you can
Science has more in common with laugh, cry, and exult with. And
soap opera than meets the eye, they are incredibly passionate
because science is a story, often tak­
about their work.
ing the form of a quest or a struggle Consider, for example, the
against seemingly impossible odds. scientists and engineers charged
As my favorite novelist, Willa with building those robot rovers
Gather, says, “There are only two or now exploring the surface of Mars.
three great human stories, and they We followed their efforts in a show
reputation may not survive another moment, you’ll see in animated
debacle. form how it’s all supposed to look
True, NASA has already and how it’s all supposed to land.
put a rover on Mars - But, as you will also
Pathfinder in 1997. see, mere months
But Pathfinder was before launch things
just a proof of con­ aren’t going as expect­
cept. Now the objec­ ed. A parachute has
tive was to send some­ failed catastrophically,
thing of the same dimensions, but and the design team must test it
with more and better scientific again, unable to stomach even the
instruments on board. In a thought of another malfunction.
Excerpt 1: Building MER, the Mars Exploration Rover
NARRATOR; MER is the Pathfinder rover on steroids. It has big­
ger wheels and suspension to handle rougher ter­
rain. It carries all the cameras, radios, antennas, and
the computer that runs everything - which on
Pathfinder were all part of the lander - plus the pay-
load of science instruments and the robotic arm, all
of which require more power, meaning bigger solar
arrays, more electronics, and a heater to keep things
warm at night. It’s the ultimate off-road, off-Earth,
mobile science laboratory.
And yet, because of space limitations on the
launch rocket, this pumped-up rover must fit into
the same size package that carried Pathfinder to
Mars. And that’s a problem. The solution is a
complex, fold-up rover that will have to unfold itself
after a long, cold, rough trip to Mars. And the
whole thing weighs 50 percent more than
Pathfinder, which is an even bigger problem....

go on repeating themselves as called Mars: Dead or Alive, which

fiercely as if they had never hap­
pened before.”
Better yet, science is a story
in which the key performers are,
not cells, not stars, not equations,
but people. And while the techno­
phobes might have you believe that
those people are cold and unfeel­
aired at the same time as the first
January landing. And about
halfway into the show, you cannot
help but sweat with these guys. You
know the stakes could not be high­
er. That more than half of all Mars
missions have failed. That, in the
wake of the Shuttle disaster, NASA’s
Excerpt 2: Entry, descent, and landing
NARRATOR: The biggest challenge will be the last six minutes of
the journey.
STEVE SQUYRES: During entry, descent, and landing, the rover is on its
own, okay? There is no back-and-forth between the
vehicle and Earth. We’ve taught it what to do, and it
does it or it doesn’t.
NARRATOR: Atmospheric friction will slow the spacecraft from

7 8
 about 12,000 to 900 miles per hour, then a para­
chute takes over. The heat shield falls away, and the
lander descends on a long bridle. Now the rover
inside keeps track of the altitude with radar. At 900
feet a cocoon of airbags inflates around the lander.
Just seconds before impact, reverse rockets fire to
soften the blow, and then ...
SQUYRES: They bounce, they bounce, they bounce, they
bounce, they bounce, they roll, they bounce, they
roll, they bounce. And that can go on for quite a
while. 1 mean we can roll and bounce, like, a kilome­
ter.
NARRATOR: The landing sites have been chosen with safety in
mind.
SQUYRES: But 1 can’t tell you that somewhere in the middle of
that there isn’t a five-meter-tall, pointy, sharp rock,
that if you just happen to have a bad day, you land
on, pop your airbags, and that’s it. There is an ele­
ment of luck about it....
Excerpt 3: Parachute crisis
NARRATOR: It takes weeks to build a parachute, so, with time
running out, they’ve come to the test with several
design variations, hoping that one of them will work.
ADAM STELTZNER: This test is the big deal. If we have a failure here,
that’s going to start a measure of desperation we
never want to find ourselves in, so ...
NARRATOR: The first chute will be fired from a mortar on top of
the tower when the wind is up to speed.
TEST CONTROLLER: 5, 4, 3,2,1, fire!
WAYNE LEE: Hello? That’s strange.
(Entry, Descent,
and Landing Systems
Engineer, MER)
NARRATOR: This was not in the plans. The chute fails to inflate, a
phenomenon known as “squidding.” Instead of
solving a problem, they’ve uncovered a new one,
and they don’t know what’s causing it.
STELTZNER: This is super, super, super, mega .. . this is super,
megabummer. Just when we thought we were there.
9 10
just about to cross the finish line, out of nowhere this
thing comes. It certainly was the worst feelings I’d
had thus far in the project.
NARRATOR: In 30 years of testing this type of chute, from Viking
through Pathfinder, squidding has never been seen
before.
STELTZNER: It looks like it... we’d expect it to just go now.
Come on! Go now!
The parachute is displaying that it has a personality
disorder. In a situation like, this you need to think
about all the possible solutions. And then you have
to get moving down all of those solution paths,
because you don’t know which one is going get you
out of the woods.
JUAN CRUZ: Okay, 1 need a favor from you.
Landing Systems
Engineer, MER)
NARRATOR: They can’t prove the strength of the new parachutes
until they find and correct the cause of the squid­
ding.
STELTZNER: This is a bit of a ghost. By the end of this week, it
could be an unpleasant memory. Or it could stay
with us, and be a very, very serious problem that we
might not really have a solution for.
MARK DAVIS: What happens if you don’t get a
Nova Producer solution for it?
STELHNER: Well, it would be dramatic, but this could be a mis-
sion-ender.. ..
It can get you down. You can find yourself eating a
lot, drinking too much. And it’s really an important
practice to keep on top of the stress. I’m exercising
more than I’ve exercised in my entire life. I’m work­
ing out once a day, at least, because if 1 don’t, 1 go
crazy.
Now that’s all very watch- sion is to go where commercial
able - or so I can imagine some of broadcasters don’t? So what about
you thinking. But all the same, isn’t the tough stuff? Esoteric. Non­
space travel inherently sexy? And visual. Mathematical, even. How
didn’t you just say that Nova’s mis- does Nova find popular appeal in
that? If that’s what you’re wonder­
ing, you’re not alone. In fact, some
of my own colleagues at PBS
thought we were crazy a few years
ago when we decided to tackle one
of the most abstract and mathematical
and seemingly untelegenic subjects you
could ever hope to meet - string theory.
the subspecialty of physics which holds
that everything in the universe is made
of tiny vibrating
strings. But you
can’t show the
strings because
they are each
billions of times
smaller than an
atom. And you
can’t even imag­
ine them, because they vibrate in 11
dimensions.
Nevertheless, we went
ahead with the mini-series, commit­
ting ourselves to not one, not two,
but three string theory hours.
Though not because every subject
under the Sun is doable if only
you’re clever and creative enough. It
may sound as if I’m saying that, but
I’m not. Rather, we took on string
theory because, when we looked into
it, we found, amid all the math, a
story. A quest. With all the requisite
ingredients of a tellable tale.
Conflict. Crisis. Character. We also
11
found a peerless host in the person
of Brian Greene, a Columbia
University physicist whose powers of
communication had made his book
on string theory. The Elegant
Universe, an international bestseller.
We based our shows on the book,
and recruited Brian as our guide.
As you might be expecting, I
have a clip to show you from these
programs. But
first, some
additional
background.
The story here
is the quest to
find a Theory
of Everything,
pursued first
by Einstein, then by a tenacious
group of string theorists. The con­
flict arises because of what’s at stake.
Nothing less than the credibility of
cosmology. For as outlandish as
string theory may seem - and it cer­
tainly can seem downright nutty -
without it we are left with two utter­
ly irreconcilable views of the uni­
verse. On the one hand, we have
Einstein’s general relativity, govern­
ing very large objects, like stars and
planets and people. On the other
hand: quantum mechanics, govern­
ing very small objects, like atoms and
their constituent particles.
In this scene, Brian traces everythinghehaves like the very tini­
the emergence of quantum mechan­ est things. It’s an imaginary zone
ics by taking us to a place where which we call the Quantum Cafe.
BRIAN GREENE: Then, in the late 1920s, all that changed. During those
years, physicists developed a new theory called
“quantum mechanics” and it was able to decribe the
microscopic realm with great success. But here’s the
thing: quantum mechanics was so radical a theory
that it completely shattered all previous ways of look­
ing at the universe.
Einstein’s theories demand that the universe is
orderly and predictable, but Niels Bohr disagreed.
He and his colleagues proclaimed that at the scale
of atoms and particles, the world is a game of
chance. At the atomic or quantum level, uncertainty
rules. The best you can do, according to quantum
mechanics, is predict the chance or probability of
one outcome or another. And this strange idea
opened the door to an unsettling new picture of
reality.
It was so unsettling that if the bizarre features of
quantum mechanics were noticeable in our everyday
world, like they are here in the Quantum Cato, you
might think you’d lost your mind.
WALTER The laws in the quantum world are very different
H. G. LEWIN: from the laws that we are used to. Our daily experi­
ences are totally different from anything that you
would see in the quantum world. The quantum world
is crazy. It’s probably the best way to put it: it’s a
crazy world.
12
GREENE: For nearly 80 years, quantum mechanics has suc­
cessfully claimed that the strange and bizarre are
typical of how our universe actually behaves on
extremely small scales. At the scale of everyday life,
we don’t directly experience the weirdness of quan­
tum mechanics. But here in the Quantum Caf6, big,
everyday things sometimes behave as if they were
microscopically tiny. And no matter how many times
I come here, I never seem to get used to it.
I’ll have an orange juice, please.
BARTENDER: I’ll try.
I had to take the time to let you know that my
six-year-old son has become completely obsessed
with quantum physics, especially in the area of
string theory. We happened to tape one of your
excellent Nova programs. Subsequently, his
number one Christmas gift from Santa was the
three-hour video. I was also dragged off to
Borders, where he picked up a book on super­
strings, symmetry, and the theory of everything.
. . . Although I am finding this taxing I really
wanted to thank you from the bottom of my
heart.

Well, we thought that e-mail from Seattle,

set a record. But this one came in

Believe it or not, our son Cameron turned five

in February and he is enthralled with string
theory. We are currently (at his request) read­
ing your Elegant Universe to him every night
GREENE: “I’ll try,” she says. You see, they’re not used to peo­
ple placing definite orders here in the Quantum
as bedtime reading. He has already memorized
Caf6, because here everything is ruled by chance. your DVD.
While I’d like an orange juice, there is only a particu­
lar probability that I’ll actually get one.
We’re thinking now of re-releasing movies, in Jurassic Park. You saw it
And there’s no reason to be disappointed with one
The Elegant Universe - the ultra­ on TV, in Walking with Dinosaurs,
particular outcome or another, because quantum
mechanics suggests that each of the possibilities, sound version. produced by the BBC and
like getting a yellow juice or a red juice, may actually But an interesting story Discovery Communications. And
happen. They just happen to happen in universes and compelling characters aren’t just now you saw it in the Quantum
that are parallel to ours, universes that seem as real
to their inhabitants as our universe seems to us.
the only essential ingredients for a Cafr. Which means it has finally
successful program. Great visuals become so affordable that even PBS
are indispensable, because, after all, can use it! The potential is huge
I’ve long known how much our fall season, garnering ratings 60 it’s television. Of the many and so are the pitfalls. The prob­
a good story, not to mention a percent above the PBS average. For advances that have taken place in lem with the use of such intensely
charismatic host, can do for a topic, another thing, it attracted some television production since I’ve real computer imagery is that it
rather unexpected attention. been with Nova, none has been may dupe viewers into believing
but I have to admit that even I was
more astounding than the advent that the world it creates is real
surprised by how broadly appealing Consider the following e-mail, from
of CGI, or computer-generated instead of simply hypothetical. On
The Elegant Universe actually proved a viewer in New Jersey.
imagery. You saw CGI at the the other hand, employed judi-
to be. For one thing, it was the hit of

13 14
ciously, CGI lets us attach a visual a composite image. When the
metaphor to just about anything - scene is finished, it begins to
even, as we saw just, the abstrac­ explain how gravity, which seems
tions of quantum mechanics. like such a powerful force to us, is
What I’m going to show actually far weaker than electro­
you is another scene from The magnetism. Intercut is a behind-
Elegant Universe, to give you a taste the-scenes glimpse of life in the
of what went on behind the scenes. studio and some of the hardships
You’ll see material we filmed in the we forced Brian to endure for the
studio with a green screen, and sake of public understanding of sci­
then see how our animators ence. You’ll also see why we ask
replaced the green screen with a ourselves, why go on location any
CGI background - in what’s called more?
BRIAN GREENE: We tend to think that gravity is a powerful force.
After all, it’s the force that, right now, is anchoring
me to this ledge. But compared to electromagnet­
ism, it’s actuaily terribly feeble. In fact, there’s a sim­
ple little test to show this. Imagine that I was to leap
from this rather tall building. Actually, let’s not just
imagine it. Let’s do it. You’ll see what I mean.
(He appears to leap from the top
of the building and fall to the
street below, landing on his feet.)
Now, of course, I really should have been flattened.
But the important question is: what kept me from
crashing through the sidewalk and hurtling right
down to the center of the Earth?
Now, lest you think we in a correspondent, ABC’s Robert
can’t do without these newfangled Krulwich, in my opinion, one of
graphics. I’d like to show you how commercial television’s outstand­
sometimes the most rudimentary ing talents and one who is genuine­
approach does the trick, as in “keep ly interested in science. But we
it simple, stupid.” In 2000 we were more than a little nervous
decided to make a two-hour pro­ when Robert walked in to interview
gram on the Human Genome Eric Lander with two of the cheesi-
Project, which turned out to be an est props I’ve ever seen in my life.
enormous challenge. We brought Still, they worked. Let’s take a look.
ROBERT KRULWICH: When I look at this - and these are the three billion
chemical letters, instructions for a human being -
my eyes glaze over. But when scientist Eric Lander
looks at this, he sees stories.
ERIC LANDER: (Whitehead Institute/MIT) The genome Is a storybook that’s
been edited for a couple billion years. And you could take it
to bed like A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and read a
different story in the genome every night.
KRULWICH: This is the story of one of the greatest scientific
adventures ever, and at the heart of it is a small, very
powerful molecule, DNA.
For the past ten years, scientists all over the world
have been painstakingly trying to read the tiny
instructions buried inside our DNA. And now, finally,
the Human Genome has been decoded.
J. CRAIG VENTER: (President, Cetera Genomics) We’re at the moment
that scientists wait for. This is what we wanted to
do, you know. We’re now examining and interpret­
ing the genetic code.

FRANCIS COLLINS: (National Human Genome Research Institute) This is

the ultimate imaginable thing that one could do sci­
entifically - to go and look at our own instruction
book and then try to figure out what it’s telling us.

KRULWICH: And what it’s telling us is so surprising and so

strange and so unexpected. Fifty percent of the
genes in a banana are in us?

(Krulwich holds up a banana.)

LANDER: How different are you from a banana?

15
16
KRULWICH: I feel - and I feel I can say this with some authority -
UNDER: This distance is about from ... this distance is about 10
very different from a banana.
angstroms.

LANDER; You may feel different...

KRULWICH; That’s one billionth of a meter when it’s clumped up
in a very particular way.
KRULWICH: I eat a banana.

UNDER: Well no, it’s curled up something like that but you see it’s
LANDER: All the machinery for replicating your DNA, all the machinery
more than that. You can’t curl it up too much because these
for controlling the cell cycle, the cell surface, for making
little negatively charged things will repel each other, so you
nutrients, all that’s the same....
fold it on its ... I’m going to break your molecule.

KRULWICH; We’re all familiar with this thing; this shape is very
KRULWICH: No, don’t break my molecule ... very valuable.
familiar.
Cartoon version?

UNDER: You got this. And then it’s folded up like this. And then
those are folded up on top of each other. And so, in fact, if
you were to stretch out all of the DNA, it would run, oh, I
don’t know, thousands and thousands of feet.

KRULWICH; But the main thing about this is the ladder, the steps
of this ladder. If I knew it was A and T and C and C
and G and G and A ...

UNDER: No, no. It’s not G and G, it’s G and C.

KRULWICH; I’m sorry, whatever the rules are of the grammar,

Krulwich holds up a model of a DNA segment that looks yeah ... if I could read each of the individual lad­
like a twistable ladder. ders, I might find the picture of what?

UNDER; Well, of your children. This is what you pass to your children.
UNDER; ... double helix ... You know, people have known for 2,000 years that your kids
look a lot like you. Well, it’s because you must pass them
KRULWICH: ... double helix. First of all. I’m wondering ... this
something, some instructions that give them the eyes they
is my version of a DNA molecule. Is this, by the way,
have and the hair color they have and the nose shape they
what it looks like?
do. And the only way you pass it to them is in these sen
tences. That’s it.
UNDER: Well, give or take. I mean, a cartoon version, yeah.

KRULWICH: So there are ... in every ... almost every cell in So what does the future shows - featuring, for example,
your body, if you look deep enough, you will find this
chain here
hold? Well, this might surprise motorcycles and interior design.
you, but there seems to be less on- All of which leaves us in a league
UNDER; Oh yes, stuck in the nucleus of your cell.
air science now than the little there increasingly our own, with a
KRULWICH: Now how small is this, if in a real DNA molecule the was before. Sure, there are still responsibility greater than ever
distance between the two walls is how wide? giant sharks and unsolved murders. before.
UNDER; Oh golly ...
And blockbusters of the Walking For even as some unfortu­
with Dinosaurs variety. But there nate is voted off the island, even as
KRULWICH; Look at this. He’s asking for help.
seems to be a trend away even from yet another nose is straightened to
these in favor of reality and lifestyle perfection in front of millions, sci-
17
18
ence is surging ahead. The discov­ that science is important to know Advisory Committee for the Aifred and Juiia Hiii Lectures
eries are world changing, the issues about, it’s like saying, “My extra
vital, and too many Americans weight is important to lose,” or June Adamson Professor Emerita of Journalism
woefully uninformed. They need “War and Peace is important to
Paul Ashdown Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media
to know about these things, and, read.” Maybe they are referring to
believe it or not, we have reason to an activity both patently worth­ C. Edward Caudill Associate Dean for Graduate Studies & Research;
Professor of Journalism & Electronic Media
believe they want to know about while and tiresome to contemplate.
George Everett Professor Emeritus of Journalism
them. According to the National Ah, but if that’s true, then we are in
Science Board, the vast majority of a truly hopeful situation, both we at James A. Crook Professor Emeritus and former Director of the
School of Journalism
adult Americans describe their gen­ Nova and anyone who might be
Faye Julian Interim Dean of the College of Communication and Information
eral reaction to science and tech­ contemplating a career in TV sci­
nology with words like “hope” and ence. Because we know that science Kelly Leiter Meeman Professor Emeritus and former
Dean of the College of Communications
“wonder.” And more than 80 per­ isn’t like losing weight at all. It’s
Mark Littmann Julia G, & Alfred G. Hill Professor of Science, Technology,
cent of those polled in national sur­ not a slog - not tedious, alien, or and Medical Writing
veys say that science is something burdensome. And with everything
Bonnie Riechert Assistant Professor of Advertising and Public Relations
important to know about. Now we have learned over the years, and
David Lee Smith Director and Associate Professor, School of
that’s odd. You’d think the com­ all the new tools at our disposal, we Journalism and Electronic Media
mercial networks, who are running now have an unprecedented oppor­
Richard Smyser Founding Editor of The Oak Ridger and
away from science, would also have tunity to show everyone else what former Meeman Professor of Journalism
surveys showing that 80 percent we know to be true. Dwight Teeter Professor and former Dean of the College of Communications
figure. But maybe, when people say
John Noble Wilford Science Correspondent and Senior Writer, The New York Times

Illustration credits:

Thanks to:
Paula S. Apsell for supplying video clips for her Hill Lecture, from which
these still frames were taken.

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, NBC, page 2

The Secret of Photo 51, page 11

Gary Glassman, Writer, Producer, and Director;
Paula S. Apsell, Executive Producer

Mars; Dead or Alive, page 8

Mark Davis, Writer, Producer, and Director; Paula S. Apsell, Senior Executive Producer

The Elegant Universe, pages 12,13,15

Joseph McMaster and Julia Cort, Writers, Producers, and Directors;
Paula S. Apsell, Senior Executive Producer

Cracking the Code of Life, page 17

Elizabeth Arledge, Director; Elizabeth Arledge and Julia Cort, Writers and Producers;
Paula S. Apsell, Executive Producer

19
Special thanks: Hill Lecture Booklets

Previous Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures are available in booklet form.
For a copy, contact the School of Journalism and Electronic Media, University of Tennessee.
The School of Journalism and Electronic Media
IS deeply grateful to:
1989 John Noble Wilford Science as Exploration
1991 Dorothy Nelkin Risk Communication and the Mass Media
1993 Gina Kolata Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies
1994 Victor Cohn Reporting—Good and Bad—on Health in America
1996 Jim Detjen Environmental News: Where Is It Going?
1997 Jon Franklin The End of Science Writing
1999 Robert Kanigel The Perils of Popularizing Science
2000 John Noble Wilford Science Journalism Across Two Centuries , ■
2001 Sharon Begley Why Science Journalism Isn’t Science
2002 David Quammen Midnight in the Garden of Fact and Factoid
2003 John Rennie Naysaying the Nincompoops:
On Being a Maven in a Misinformed Era
2004 Paula Apsell What’s Hot, What’s Not in Science Programming

21

d,
 ;

;•
•■, ■ ■
-mHUNIVERSITYo/rENNESSEE ■- i
■ -i

i
Jonathan
Weiner
On the Writing of

His Brother's Keeper:

A Story from the Edge of Medicine

Thirteenth
Alfred & Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media
March 14, 2005

School of Journalism and Electronic Media

College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science, society, and the mass media was
established in 1989 by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.

Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949, seven years after the govern­
ment established Oak Ridge to house workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak
Ridger v/is the first successful privately owned newspaper in the city and marked an
important stage in the transition of Oak Ridge from federal operation to private
ownership and self-government.
Jonathan
Published by
Weiner
School of Journalism and Electronic Media On the Writing of
College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee
His Brothers Keeper:
Serial Editor: Mark Littmann
A Story from the Edge of Medicine
Julia G. and Alfred G. Hill Professor of Science,
Technology, and Medical Writing

Serial Designer: Eric L. Smith

Lecturer, Journalism and Electronic Media
and Assistant Director, Department of
Student Publications

Serial Design Consultant: Robert Heller

Associate Professor of Journalism
and Electronic Media
Thirteenth
Editorial Assistant: Anna Greene Alfred & Julia Hill Lecture
Science Communication Initiative Graduate on Science, Society, and the Mass Media
Assistant, Journalism and Electronic Media March 14, 2005

School of Journalism and Electronic Media

College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee
On the Writing o/His Brother’s Keeper: A Story from the Edge of Medicine
© 2005 Jonathan Weiner
Publication Authorization Number ROl-2910-057-002-06
 Jonathan Weiner
Jonathan Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize
for General Non-Fiction and the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize for Science for The Beak of
the Finch, which the Washington Post Book World placed in the select
pantheon of science books that spark not just the intellect, but the imagi­
nation. His latest book, His Brothers Keeper: A Story from the Edge of
Medicine, explores the hopes and fears of the new biology.
His other books include Planet Earth, the companion book to
the Emmy Award-winning PBS television series; and Time, Love, Memory,
which explored the subject of behavioral genetics and won a National
Book Critics Circle Award.
Weiner’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York
Times, New Republic, and the Washington Post. When he is not writing,
he enjoys teaching. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at Rockefeller
University; the McCraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University;
and Rhodes Chair Professor at Arizona State University. He has lectured
at the Smithsonian Institution; the California Institute of Technology;
the Linnean Society of London; and aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the
Galapagos Islands.
Weiner entered science journalism as a senior editor of The
Sciences, the magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. He earned
his bachelor’s degree in English and American literature from Harvard
University, graduating cum laude in 1976.
In 2005, Weiner joined Columbia University as a professor in the
Graduate School of Journalism.
Weiner is married to Deborah Heiligman, who writes children’s
books. They have two sons.
S On the Writing of
M His Brothers Keeper:
S ^ Story from the Edge ofMedicine
^ by Jonathan Weiner
Jf thought the way I would approach the subject this evening is
to hearken back to something that a wonderful writer told me when I
was just starting out. His name was John Pfeiffer, and he wrote mostly
about evolution and physical anthropology. He had gone down into
every painted cave there is on the planet, just about. I once asked him
how he had been so prolific, and how he how he had found the subjects
for his books. He said that one book simply leads to another. In almost
every one of his books he could look at the last chapter, even the last
page, or the last paragraph sometimes, and it pointed him straight
toward his next project.
Well, shortly after he told me that, I finished my second book, which was
about global warming, a book called The Next One Hundred Years, and I
was stuck. I could not figure out what I wanted to do for the next book.
And I didn't feel as if it led to the next book. After the next one hundred
years what? I couldn't see farther than that, and I couldn't imagine where
I'd go - what story I would tell.
And I was stuck for about six months - which, when you're writing books
full time and supporting a family doing that, means you're out of work for
six months. It was a serious, serious lapse of time, that six months - and
I finally looked up, on an inspiration, a biologist at Princeton named
John Tyler Bonner, who had written wonderful books about biology - in
particular about his specialty, the social amoeba. I looked him up and he
was kind enough to have lunch with me, and I said, "You got me into this
3
- writing books about science. What should I write about next?" And
he said, "You have to talk to my friends Peter and Rosemary Grant here
at Princeton. They go to the Galapagos Islands every year. They spend
months in the Galapagos on this tiny desert island called Daphne Major.
They are observing Darwin's finches - the birds that led Darwin to his
theory, and they're watching evolution in action. They're seeing evolution
before their eyes from season to season in the beaks of the finches."
The moment he told me that, I knew that that was the next book. There
was no question in my mind that I had to write about it. He said,
"Unfortunately the Grants are leaving in two days for the Galapagos
Islands, and when they’re gone, you won't be able to communicate with
them. Nobody can while they're on the islands." I said, "When will they
be back?" He said, "Oh, a couple of months from now."
And I knew, I knew that I just had to meet them before they left, and I had
to get permission to write the book. So I talked to John and to another
friend in the Princeton biology department, and everything I heard con­
vinced me that I just had to talk to Peter and Rosemary.
The next day Peter Grant called me on the phone. Both John and my
other friend in the department had told Peter: You've got to talk to this
guy - and he was kind enough to have lunch with me just before he left
for the Galapagos.
But after he left, John Boimer called me up and read me this little note that
Peter Grant had left him to convey to me, which was, "We have decided ...
" -1 wish I could do a British accent; Peter Grant has a wonderful British
accent and the note was very much in Peter Grant's voice. It said, "We
have decided that we'd rather not be written about until our project is
completed. We'll wrap it up in a year or two, and that's when you'd prob­
ably like to write about us." By the way, this was in 1989, and the Grants
are still working in the Galapagos Islands.
And there I was. They were gone to the Galapagos. I had been look­
ing for a book for six months, and I knew this was it. I had to write this
book. And I also knew that I had to write a book; I had to get started on
something.
4 5
So I thought over the reasons Peter had given in his note to me. I felt
I could answer his objections really well, if only he were here for me to
answer. For instance, the Grants had some funding from the National
Geographic Society. He was concerned that the National Geographic
Society would have a problem with my writing a book. So I called the
National Geographic Society: No, they wouldn't have a problem with my
writing the book. And so on and so on. Also, I really wanted to write
about science in action. I wanted to look over people's shoulders. That's
what I enjoy doing. Meeting people and getting to know them and hav­
ing the sense of human personality and character entwined through the
book. Science comes out of human personality. It’s not just a chunk of
textbook learning.
So I had the overwhelming chutzpah to go ahead and write a book pro­
posal while Peter and Rosemary were marooned on their desert island. I
had an agent at the time, Victoria Pryor, who submitted it to a bunch of
publishers. And they had an auction and one publisher bought the rights
to publish the book and then auctioned the rights for foreign sales of the
book.
By the time Peter and Rosemary came back, I was deep in this book. It was
pretty awkward imagining what I was going to say to them. So I spent a
day trying to write this letter to them. This was back in 1989. As soon as
they were back, I sent this letter. I sent it as a fax - the first fax I had ever
sent - because I didn't want to lose a minute.
I explained all the reasons why I felt they would understand, no doubt,
that I had gone ahead and started on this book. Then I waited and I
watched my mailbox. A whole month went by without a reply. Finally,
in the tiniest envelope that Princeton University provides - I mean it was
barely large enough to hold the postage stamp - I had a letter from Peter
Grant. It said essentially "We look forward ..." - and this is pretty much
word for word - "We look forward to hearing more about your project as
you approach completion."
Meaning: When you’re just about done, let us know and we'll be happy to
meet with you.
So I started in on the book. I met everybody I could who was connected
with the Grants. I talked with all their former students. I traveled around
the country. I went up to Canada to find people who knew the Grants
and their work. And then I hitched a ride down to the Galapagos with a
former student of theirs. I spent some time, several weeks, touring around
the islands. Still really without a welcome from Peter and Rosemary.
And I completely understood their point of view. I had started this book
without their permission on the conviction that they would someday feel
it was a good idea.
I think after about two years, I persuaded them that I was a serious guy.
That I wasn't going to write a piece of junk. Toward the end of the project,
after we got to know each other, they either resigned themselves to me or
decided that I was an honorary quasi-graduate student and they could
talk to me - that I wasn't really a journalist after all. They were most afraid
that I was going to describe them as some kind of Swiss Family Robinson.
You know, that sort of Disney-like fantasy we have of a family on a desert
island. Because they had raised two little girls on this little hump of rock
in the middle of the Galapagos. That I was going to sweeten it too much.
I was going to make it too pretty.
“Excuse me, did I hear you say at It hadn't been pretty. When
they read it at the end, they
dinner that you are starting a book
told me I had gotten it about
about evoiution?” I said, “Yeah,” right. It was more Robinson
Crusoe than Swiss Family
very excited. And she said, “Are Robinson. And that was
you for it or against it?” okay. We ended up friends
the last year I was writing
that book. We talked often
and they shared a great deal.
I just have to share a couple of stories, since this is Tennessee and we're
talking about evolution. If I had been working here, I wouldn't have been
surprised. But my home is in the Philadelphia area, so I was stunned by
the reactions I got from people when I told them that I was writing about
evolution - evolution in action. I hadn’t known you could watch evolu­
tion in action. I still remember a dinner party at my sister-in-law’s house.
It was a big party and she had hired a few people to help out with the din­
6
ner. One of the women who had been serving the meal was helping me
get my coat at the end of the evening. She said, "Excuse me, did I hear you
say at dinner that you are starting a book about evolution?" I said, "Yeah,"
very excited. And she said, "Are you for it or against it?"
Then about a week later I was at my dentist's office, getting my annual
teeth cleaning. The dental hygienist had on one of those hygienic masks,
and she was looming in my face, and she was asking what I was writ­
ing about next. I said, "Evolution," and she said, "Well, I'm a Jehovah's
Witness, so you know what I think about that." And, you know, I really
didn't feel in a position to argue.
When The Beak of the Finch was almost done -1 was working on the last
chapter - my computer swallowed it - the entire last chapter. I had pulled
two all-nighters in a row, and maybe I did something wrong or maybe it
was the computer’s fault, but anyway, it froze. It was more of a hardware
problem than a software problem. I could not get that chapter out of the
machine, and I had to get it out. I really liked the last chapter - and there
were deadlines.
And he said, “I have a Ph.D. in
So I called the local computer
store and a guy answered the engineering and I can teii you
phone. I said I realized they
were already closed, because that this worid was engineered
I knew the hours there, but - designed and created - within
would he be so kind as to let
me in and take a look at this the iast 6,000 years.” So there we
computer? And very, very
were, iooking at each other over
kindly, he did. He listened to
my story, and he was so sym­ the pieces of my computer.
pathetic that he agreed to try
to fix the computer then and
there on the spot, on the counter. So he opened it up and I'm seeing all
the innards of my computer, which you really don't want to be looking
at when you're facing a deadline and your chapter is somewhere in there.
After about twenty minutes, he has the whole computer spread out across
the counter. He's working on it very earnestly, and he says, "By the way,
what's your book about?" Well, you know. I'm not really cut out for the
diplomatic corps, and I didn't think twice. I just said, "Evolution." And
7
he said, "I have a Ph.D. in engineering and I can tell you that this world
was engineered - designed and created - within the last 6,000 years." So
there we were, looking at each other over the pieces of my computer. And
then he had the good nature and the charity to keep going. He fixed the
computer and the chapter came out, and I dined out on that story for a
while. We just agreed to disagree.
Yet how can you disagree with evolution, watching over the shoulders of
the Grants and seeing evolution in action? You could just as well say of
gravity "Are you for it or against it?"
In spite of people’s reactions I kept encountering in Pennsylvania and
elsewhere, I keep thinking back to watching evolution in action in a beau­
tiful place like the Galapagos Islands - or watching evolution proceeding
everywhere, including in this room as I speak. Watching evolution opens
up vistas that are not only fascinating to the mind, but are challenging
and stirring spiritually. I don't really see why we need to segregate our
spiritual feelings from our rational feelings. We are all moving on parallel
lines. With that in mind. I’d like to read you the epigraph from The Beak
of the Finch. I think very hard about the epigraphs in my books: the ones
at the beginning of each chapter and also the quotation I put at the begin­
ning of the book. I chose this epigraph from the Book of Job:
And where is the place of understanding?
It is hid from the eyes of all living and
concealed from the birds of the air.
The Beak of the Finch led immediately to another book, because I went back
to John Bonner and said, "Okay, John, I finished that book. What should I
write about next?" And he said, "Call my friend Ralph Greenspan."
So I called Ralph Greenspan, who turned out to be studying something
that I thought was completely impossible as the subject for a book. It
was the fruit fly’s sense of time. Upon first hearing, that doesn't sound
promising as a three- or four-years-long book project. I asked Ralph why
he was so excited about it. At that time he was at New York University.
Now he's at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California. Ralph said.
8 9
We now understand the sense of time of the fruit fly. It exhibits this sense
of time in some of the same ways human beings do. The fly wakes up in
the morning and goes to sleep at night: it has a circadian rhythm of about
one day. It even takes a nap in the middle of the day, and the male fruit
fly sings its love song and dances its Fred Astaire routines to the female
fly with a certain rhythm that’s particular to each species. What’s been
found is the piece of DNA that is central to the fruit fly’s sense of time.
It’s called period - that’s what my mentor’s mentor named it. His name
is Seymour Benzer. And we can take that DNA out of one species of fruit
fly and inject it into another species of fruit fly. When we do, we transfer
the particular sense
of time and rhythm If we can identify the segment of
and love song and
human DNA that produces a particuiar
courtship dance
from one fly species human behavior, what are we going to do
to another.
with that information? What that means is
Now we’re looking
at other connections this: In a very short time we wiil be
between DNA and
pianning our own future evoiution.
behavior - while the
rest of the world still
thinks that the con­
nections between DNA and behavior are hypothetical.
At this point, I was developing great enthusiasm for this subject. From
the study of the beaks of finches, I learned that evolution is constantly in
action in every generation of every species. Now I realized that biologists
were acquiring an understanding of the connections between DNA and
behavior. The study of DNA had advanced rapidly in the last hundred
years.
I immediately made a leap: The study of DNA is going to take us very very
quickly to the connections between human DNA and human behavior.
Such connections have to be more complicated than they are in a fruit fly,
but they’re there. So we’re going to be looking at an enormously contro­
versial and difficult area: If we can identify the segment of human DNA
that produces a particular human behavior, what are we going to do with
that information? What that means is this: In a very short time we will be
planning our own future evolution.
So I started with talking to Ralph's mentor, Jeff Hall at Brandeis; then I
started talking to Jeff’s mentor, Seymour Benzer at Caltech. It turned out
they were looking at DNA connected not only with the sense of time, but
also with the male’s attraction to the female fly, and the female’s attraction
to the male. And occasionally in some flies, the male’s attraction to other
males. Jeff Hall spends a lot of time studying and filming the courtship
behavior of fruit flies. He makes "blue movies" - that’s what he calls them.
And he plays rock songs while he watches. One of his favorites is Aretha
Franklin singing "Chain Chain Chain." Jeff Hall is a really crazy guy!
So I got to know Jeff and then I got to know Seymour. Seymour Benzer
is one of the world's greatest eccentrics and also one of the world's great­
est scientists. I'm happy to say that finally, in his old age, he's being rec­
ognized. He's been honored with virtually every prize in science and I
hope someday he'll receive the Nobel Prize, which he richly deserves for
his work. As a young man, during World War II, he pioneered electron­
ics. Then he switched fields and pioneered the study of DNA. Now he’s
moved on to this extraordinary study of DNA and behavior. It is intrigu­
ing, difficult, scary, controversial - all of that - and the implications of his
work are going to explode in this century.
Seymour Benzer is going strong in his 80s, still does research, still works
through the night on fruit flies. He's now interested in a mutant fruit fly
he calls Methuselah because it lives a long time. When he began his study
of aging, it seemed as outrageous as anything he had done. But it too is
now becoming mainstream. More and more people are looking at the
connections between DNA and long life.
With genetic engineering, you can take the genes out of one fly and inject
them into another fly. Some of those very same genes govern our sense
of time, our sexual development, our ability to remember and even our
ability to forget. (That’s why I used those words - Time, Love, Memory
- as the title of my book on Benzer and his fruit flies.)
10
And aging too is in our genes. You can find pieces of DNA in a yeast or
in flies or in mice or in worms that extend their lives. Those segments of
DNA may very well have similar effects on our human lives. So, within
the lifetime of students in this room, we may be very tempted as a society
to try to start engineering our own evolutionary progress. With the same
techniques that fruit fly engineers, those gene engineers of Drosophila
melanogaster, used, we could begin injecting DNA into very early human
embryos.
Well, clearly I saw where my next book had to go after writing Time, Love,
Memory. I wanted to tell a story about how this revolution in biology is
affecting human life today. There had to be stories - stories close to home
- in which the possibility of the injection of DNA to save a human life was
being refined in a way that would soon lead to ethical questions about the
next steps in human evolution.
I found that story though Ralph Greenspan. So Bonner had lead me to
Greenspan, and then Greenspan called me up one day early in 1999 and
did just what Bonner had done. He said. You have to talk to my friend
here at the Neurosciences Institute. Jamie Heywood is this young guy.
He's not really a scientist; he's an entrepreneur. He's this amazing entre­
preneur. We hired him as our product development guy, Greenspan said.
He's here at the Neurosciences Institute, this think tank for brain scien­
tists, to help us come up with ways to get patents, to bring our ideas to the
market place, to sell them to corporations and maybe to make profits that
we can plow back into our research at the Institute.
Jamie Heywood had recently learned that his younger brother Stephen,
a carpenter, had been diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease. As you
know, that is a death sentence. ALS means a victim probably has only a
couple of years to live. Jamie was refusing to accept that death sentence
for Stephen. The moment Jamie heard the news, Ralph told me, he started
searching for a cure for Stephen. He began talking with me and all of us
at the Institute, trying to come up with an idea. He wanted not only to
save his brother’s life, but to save him before the progressive paralysis that
ALS brings had robbed Stephen of the ability to do what he loves to do,
which is to build houses.
11
Jamie was about 30 years old. There were three Heywood brothers. Their
father was a graduate of MIT and a professor of engineering there. Jamie
was a graduate of MIT in engineering. And the third brother, the young­
est, had also graduated from MIT in their father's department in engi­
neering. But Stephen, the middle brother, had chosen a different route.
He was a carpenter. At the time of his diagnosis, he had just figured out
what he really wanted to do in life - to restore old homes. His plan was
to do such beautiful work in restoring one house, he could sell it at such a
profit that he'd be able to buy a bigger place just as run down: restore an
even more ambitious place. He once told me he could see doing that the
rest of his life, or at least until he turned 40. He was young enough so that
the rest of his life and age 40 seemed pretty much equivalent. He could do
that for a good 10 years. He was great at it. He had just restored and sold
his first house, in Palo Alto, for a profit of half a million dollars.
So, Ralph told me, against all odds Jamie had come up with an idea to
save Stephen. The idea was gene therapy. He had found out about some
cutting-edge research
So, Ralph told me, against all odds Johns Hopkins by
biologist and clinician
Jamie had come up with an idea to save named Jeff Rothstein,
ox L. -WL. ■-! J.U one of the world’s lead-
Stephen. The idea was gene therapy.
ing ALS researchers.
The research seemed to
point toward ALS being
a defect in one particu­
lar gene called EATT-2. Jamie was an engineer and had the hubris of an
MIT engineer, as he often told me. He was convinced that would do it, if he
could just get a healthy copy of that gene into Stephen - into the right cells
in Stephen's spine. That's where the nerves start to die in ALS, in the spine.
The nerves that connect your brain to the rest of your body and allow you to
tell your body to move: those are the nerves that start to go. So your mind
stays clear while your body fails you, which is one of the horrors of ALS.
Jamie wanted to get that gene, EATT-2, into Stephen’s nerves in just the
right spots to allow the nerves that were still alive in Stephen's spine to
survive and to save his life. Well, I knew that had to be my next story. I
12
had a personal reason for feeling tugged by it as well. As chance would
have it, my mother had begun to stumble and fall at just about the same
time that Stephen had. And eventually the diagnosis of my mother was
PSP - Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. Has anyone heard of PSP? It’s an
extremely rare disease. Unless you’re a neurologist or a family member of
a patient, chances are you’ve never heard of it. It is very similar to ALS. It
too is incurable. Its diagnosis also means a death sentence. Nobody knew
anything to do for my mother.
So I had to write about what Jamie was doing. I had to tell the story for
all the reasons I've told you till now. And also because I hoped to learn
something that might
help me in my own His wife was a circus artist and a belly
family - if not some
hard medical news, at dancer. She performed belly dancing at
least some emotion­ benefit dinners to raise money. It all got
al wisdom. I heard
an extraordinary more colorful and more improbable and
resolve and courage more novelistic by the moment. Except
in Jamie's voice the
moment I talked to nobody could make this kind of thing up.
him that day, picking -----------------------------------------------------------
up the phone after I
talked to Ralph. I
felt Jamie was an extraordinary person on an extraordinary charge in an
extraordinary race.
I pitched that story to The New Yorker magazine. I began writing about
Jamie and his race to save Stephen. And all through 1999,1 followed the
Heywood family. I got more and more involved in the family, the cause,
and in Jamie's race. Jamie moved from California back to the old family
house in Newton, Massachusetts, along with Stephen. He set up a door
desk down in the basement. It was a kind of start-up operation, just like
Silicon Valley startup days. In very much that spirit, Jamie started up a
family foundation to raise money for research. His wife was a circus artist
and a belly dancer. She performed belly dancing at benefit dinners to raise
13
money. It all got more colorful and more improbable and more novelistic
by the moment. Except nobody could make this kind of thing up.
Amazing things happened - much more than I had expected at the outset.
Jamie managed to enlist in the cause Dr. Jeff Rothstein at John Hopkins
University and other leading researchers in ALS. There were some prom­
ising rumors about a mouse laboratory where, through genetic engineer­
ing, a gene had helped to extend the life of a mouse that had something
like ALS. Jamie enlisted Dr. Matt During, a gene therapist who was then
in Philadelphia, to attempt the first clinical trial to insert a gene to correct
ALS into Stephen's spine. And do it within the year. They were racing. It
was starting to look like the first gene therapy for ALS was really going to
happen. It was starting to look like Jamie’s crash effort to cure ALS was
going to really work.
In September of 1999, Jamie and his team were about to apply for permis­
sion from the FDA to inject the EATT-2 genes into Stephen's spine - a
very dangerous operation. But then there was a tragedy: the death of a
young man in Philadelphia during a gene therapy trial. Jessie Gelsinger
had just turned 18. It was his first big act in the world to enlist in this
gene therapy trial. He had a disorder that was treatable with pills. But he
wanted out of altruism to participate in this somewhat risky clinical trial.
In retrospect, the doctors and researchers involved clearly downplayed
the risks. They shouldn't have admitted this young man into the trial. A
lot of his vital signs were not good when he was admitted. Gelsinger died
within days of the injection of the genes. His death became an incredible
scandal. Gene therapy became a hot subject for a while. In Washington,
it’s still politically hot. Virtually every gene therapy trial in the country
and around the world was shut down, including Jamie Heywood's.
It was at that point that my article appeared in The New Yorker. In the
middle of that scandal, I told the story of Jamie's race. Then, in my book
His Brother’s Keeper, I continued the story - what happened afterward.
Jamie continued to race. The story became only more intense after that,
almost a race off a cliff top. We were all hanging in a limbo watching
Stephen's disease begin to advance. My mother's disease also began to
14
advance. Matt During, the gene therapist, had offered to come up with a
radical treatment for my mother as well as for Stephen. It had all become
incredibly close to home and interlocked.
I'm not going to tell you what happened. But I am going to say that the
outcome surprised me and was bittersweet. It wasn't entirely dark; it
wasn't entirely bright. The morning before I left for Knoxville to give
this speech, Stephen sent me an e-mail. He is not well. His disease has
advanced, but through his will and the incredible support he gets from
his family, he's still able to design and direct the carpentry he wants done.
He is still able to communicate with the world. He's settled down. He's a
family guy. He is ... fine. In some ways, there are happy endings there.
I want to read you the epigraph of this book also. Again, I think a lot
about these epigraphs. This is from Lucretius’ The Way Things Are.
Lucretius was the world's first and greatest science writer. He was born
the same year as Julius Caesar, 100 B.C. He foresaw and wrote brilliantly
about evolution and environmental problems. He was fascinated by the
atomic theory and wrote better descriptions about the world of atoms
than anybody has managed to do since. And, being a poet, he understood
a lot about human nature. This is what he wrote:
If you would like to know what men and women
really are, the time to learn comes when they stand
in danger or in doubt.
For then at last words of truth are drawn from
the depths of the heart and the mask is torn off.
Reality remains.
15

Question: What are your thoughts about Stephen Hawking and his
case of ALS?
Weiner: It's an extraordinary case because he was diagnosed with ALS
in his 20s, like Stephen Heywood. Hawking is now in his 60s, and he's still
able to function. He's still doing theoretical astrophysics. When I've asked
doctors in the ALS world - like Jeff Rothstein - about that, they've always
told me that in any disease there are inexplicable outliers. There are always
people who are hit harder by a disease, much harder than average, harder
than anyone would predict. And there are also people who somehow
manage to withstand the disease. There may be clues there. If people like
Rothstein could understand it well enough, they might develop a treat­
ment and cure. Just as with AIDS. With resistance to HIV. Some people
seem to be able to be infected with HIV and, even without treatment, they
don’t get sick. There are clues there to possible treatments for AIDS. So
16
with a man like Stephen Hawking, there may be clues to the treatment of
ALS. But at the moment it's just one of those mysteries - fluky things, the
tail end of the long curve. Nobody can say, other than there is huge varia­
tion. That also means there is hope. That Stephen Heywood has lasted
this many years with his ALS is also beating the odds.
Question: I’m wondering how you got into science writing. You
earned a degree in English, not science. Do you miss not having a sci­
ence degree?
Weiner: I'm glad I didn't! Although I'd been interested in biology as
a kid, when I went to college, I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I
decided furthermore that being a writer meant you had to hate science.
So I avoided science classes. In fact, E. O. Wilson was teaching at Harvard
when I was an undergraduate there, and I didn't take his classes. Which
was stupid. In retrospect I really wish I had, but I felt writers aren't inter­
ested in science. Writers have to hate science. It was only after I got out of
school and started writing that I wrote about everything I was interested
in, everything I could interest an editor in. One little science writing effort
I made led to a job at a science magazine. The Sciences. Since then. I've just
been making up for lost time. I've been hanging around with biologists
ever since, including. I'm happy to say, E. O. Wilson and many other great
biologists. So I've learned as I've gone along.
It's got its advantages and its disadvantages, I guess - writing about science
not having studied it. For me, the greatest advantage is that I'm always
learning something new, and I'm always excited about it. I can share that
with my readers, I hope. I know what excited me when I first heard about
Peter and Rosemary Grant's work [on finches in the Gallapagos Islands]. I
hadn't learned about it in college - although it was already a textbook case
of evolution in action - because I hadn't studied biology in college. And
so all these stories come at me fresh, and I can pass them on. Three or
four years later, they are still pretty fresh. I go from one subject to another.
In defense of that I can add that if I did study science. I'd still have to do
just about as much homework for each book because each of these areas
is so specialized that you really have to retool just to go from field biology
- like the Grants - to laboratory molecular biology like Seymour Benzer.
17
Question: What sort of editorial influence or oversight on your
books do the scientists you write about have?
Weiner: You mean do I let the scientists read it before it comes out?
Question: Most writers don’t. That's one of the big complaints that
a lot of us scientists have.
Weiner: Uh-huh. That’s a very important question. I don't mean to
make light of it. I go back and forth about this often in the course of
writing. And there are times - actually, most of the time - when it feels
appropriate to me to show my stuff to the scientists I am writing about.
That was particularly scary with Peter and Rosemary Grant. After all
that, to present them with the manuscript. I still remember how relieved
they were when they read the book. They felt all right about it. The only
thing of substance they objected to that we couldn't agree on was what
Peter said near the end of the day: " I don't call Rosemary ‘darling.’ You
have me saying ‘Darling, should we release the finch now?’ or something
like that. I never say ‘darling.’" I said, "Peter, you do. I can't change that.
You do." Then at the very end of the day Peter said to Rosemary, "Well, I
think that's all our questions, isn't it, darling?" And I said, "Aha!" So the
"darling" stayed. They were afraid it was too Swiss Family Robinson. "You
know that, darling?"
Now, I've got a New Yorker article coming out at the end of this month. I
have not shown it to the scientists involved because it describes research
that's very controversial. Different research groups have been telling me
things about what they are doing but not telling their rivals. There are all
sorts of reasons why I can't just show it to them as I would prefer. But
The New Yorker has a wonderful fact-checking department. It’s legend­
ary. And the fact checker is walking through the manuscript line by line:
checking with dozens upon dozens of people I've spoken with over the last
year. So I do take all of that very seriously. But there is also something a
little bit comical about it. It’s just such an intense moment. I mean, after
years, three or four years, I might as well have gotten an undergraduate
degree from Seymour by the end of Time, Love, Memory. Presenting him
with the book and going over it with him - he's already forgotten by the
end of those three or four years that a book is coming out. As far as he is
concerned, we are just hanging out together. He says, "Oh my God, you're
18
telling that story." It was okay. We worked through all of that too.
Coleridge once said that the important thing in writing is not so much to
get the truth exactly right, because nobody can ever get it exactly right, but
to sincerely want and make the greatest effort one can to express things
correctly. And to say what's real and true.
I think that although we never quite hit the mark in writing or in our
exchanges in life as we'd like to, the sincere effort is felt by others around
us. That's sufficient to the day.
Question: You talked about becoming emotionally close to your
subjects. Is there some general advice you would give to science writ­
ers who are trying to maintain that functional objectivity when they’re
dealing with really emotional medical/health situations?
Weiner: It’s really hard. I think each person in the health field, no mat­
ter where you’re coming from, has to learn how to deal with patients and
their families in the middle of a medical crisis. I know I was very new to
it working on this book [His Brother’s Keeper], I think some people have
a gift for it. It’s part of what draws them to the health field. Experience
helps. But it’s painful. If you're going to do a good job of helping people
in the middle of medical crises, you're going to be bruised along with
them. And I certainly was as I rode the crisis along with the Heywoods.
I would have been on something like that path anyway because my own
family was. But in the course of that ride, I met people who were just
amazing in those situations. Most recently, I watched hospice workers
who had such an incredible tact and a gift at being there for us right at the
end with my mother. I think it’s something one feels one's way toward.
Question: What’s the last paragraph in His Brother’s Keeper? What
hook does it lead to next?
Weiner: Well, I mentioned Methuselah. I'm thinking a lot about the
question of how long can human beings live. Enormous questions that
once we have an answer, our whole universe is going to be transformed
for us. This is one of them. What is aging? Is it inevitable? Or is there
some gene or set of genes like Methuselah - the Methuselah gene that
Seymour Benzer discovered - that will allow us to change our life spans
19
dramatically? Serious biologists are exploring that right now, and I'm fol­
lowing some of them. It's a very interesting realm. It's not one without
its moral gray areas, and some people in this room probably - I won't
actually take a poll - but I bet you people under 25 are more enthusiastic
about the idea of living for centuries upon centuries than people over 50.
That's the way it tends to run. My Aunt Helen, who is 91, said, "Oh no,
darling. Not for me."
But the idea is not to have a longer old age. The idea is to have a longer
youth. The idea is that you can somehow extend your 20s or 30s for
decades or centuries. At least that's what the most enthusiastic people
in this field are talking about right now. So I'm following that and this
article I’ve written for The New Yorker I'm hoping will turn into a book
too. It may very well. And that one, as you'll see when it comes out, grows
directly out of this book about the Heywoods. It's very much in that ter­
ritory.
Question: You said you developed friendships or at least connections
that you've written about in your books. Do you have important stories
you don't tell - that you withhold - in the context of that friendship?
Weiner: Since I tend to develop friendships with the people I write
about, do I pay a price for that in sitting down to write because there are
stories I don't want to tell? Yeah, that is hard. I don't see any way around
it, because in order to be able to tell these stories in a novelistic sort of way
with the knowledge of the person as well as the knowledge of what they've
published in scientific journals, I have to be very close with them over a
period of years. I couldn't do this kind of book any other way.
On the other hand, when I sit down to write. I'm too conscious of what
the Grants will think, or what Seymour Benzer or what the Heywoods will
think. With His Brother’s Keeper, that was particularly challenging because
all kinds of moral quandaries came up the better I got to know Jamie's race
to save Stephen. One of the most dramatic and troubling for me was that
Jamie began to think that - you know I told you he was an entrepreneur
and that this was the Silicon Valley gold rush days in 1999 - Jamie began
to think that not only could he save Stephen with this gene therapy, but he
could also get very, very rich overnight if it worked. There was somebody
else doing something similar and made $300 million overnight by selling
20
his gene therapy idea to a biotech company called Genzyme in Boston.
So why couldn't Jamie sell his gene therapy to Genzyme? And he talked
about that with me. I felt queasy about it. I felt really queasy because I
was the writer. I was the Boswell. I had the exclusive story. I was going
to report it in The New Yorker magazine. Especially in those days in 1998
and 1999 when the stock market was superheated and ideas that were a lot
longer shots than Jamie's were making people very rich overnight. What
was I doing now? Was I on board here to tell an important story in which
you could read a lot about that moment in biology and the way biology
is coming close to home, which was my idea? Was I there to cheer on a
noble, but probably doomed race of one brother to save another? Or was
I simply to there to give The New Yorkers seal of approval to a new stock
on the market? We talked a lot about that.
In the end, I felt I had to include the troubling questions as well as the
inspiring sides of Jamie's effort to save Stephen. And I did. But I felt
that painfully as I was writing, because it meant we would no longer be
friends. And I felt my responsibility was to tell the story as well as I could,
as accurately as I could. My responsibility lay with writing the book that
I'd set out to write. The Heywoods knew I was trying to write at to the
best of my ability. But that was painful. And it was then painful for Jamie
to read. Actually I don't think Jamie was bothered by the entrepreneurial
stuff that I talked about and his hopes of making a lot of money, because
he really felt that there wasn't a conflict. If it was faster to find a treatment
and make a zillion dollars, fine. Do it by the commercial route. If it was
faster to find a treatment by the non-profit route, fine, he would do it that
way. But his family was troubled by the portrait I painted of him in the
book. It ended up being difficult between the Heywood family and me. I
can understand their point of view, and I also understand I had to make
the choice that I did.
I've thought about that a lot since the book came out. I've thought, is
there some way I can learn from that and do something differently in
future projects in which again I will become friends with my subjects? My
wife's advice is write only about people you are sure you are really going
to like everything about. That really doesn't work for journalists, unfor­
tunately. That would be pretty impossible.
I think what's going to happen is the more I learn how to do this, the more
21
 I'm going to be able to hold those opposite thoughts in my head and have
them in the air between me and my subjects from the very start. I'm try­
ing to get as realistic a picture of what's going on as I possibly can. It may
end up being positive; it may end up being negative. I'm the writer, and
for better or worse, I have to paint it as I see it at the end of the project.
Here we are, and that's the deal. And then whatever friendship grows on
that basis, we still have that understanding in the air between us all the
time. And that's probably part of being an experienced journalist. Even
after 20-odd years of doing this. I'm only just learning because I'm just
having to. Science writing rarely leads to that kind of quandary. If I write
about Peter and Rosemary Grant and their research, it wouldn't have
been likely that I would have had to say much that they would have been
bothered by. But as I write about more controversial, hot issues like gene
therapy in the middle of a global scandal about gene therapy, it's going to
get hotter, and it's not always going to be as comfortable as being a tradi­
tional science writer would be.
Advisory Committee for the Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures
June Adamson Professor Emerita of Journalism
Paul Ashdown Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media
C. Edward Caudill Associate Dean for Graduate Studies & Research;
Professor of Journalism & Electronic Media
James A. Crook Professor Emeritus and former Director of the
School of Journalism
George Everett Professor Emeritus of Journalism
Russel Hirst Associate Professor of English;
Director, Technical Communication Program
Faye Julian Interim Dean of the College of Communication and Information
Kelly Leiter Meeman Professor Emeritus and former
Dean of the College of Communications
Mark Littmann Julia G. & Alfred G. Hill Professor of Science, Technology,
and Medical Writing

That's a long answer to a short question. But it's an intense one. I think Bonnie Riechert Assistant Professor of Advertising and Public Relations
there is probably as much to learning that as there is to learning how to
Richard Smyser Founding Editor of The Oak Ridger and
be a seasoned professional in the health field. I think the more years you former Meeman Professor of Journalism
are in it, the better you get at it.
Dwight Teeter Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media and former Dean
of the College of Communications
Question: When you are writing a book, it sounds like you are com­ John Noble Wilford Science Correspondent and Senior Writer, The New York Times
pletely absorbed with the project - you’re traveling all around; you are
living with the researchers and their families. It takes you years to write
a book. Yet you survive from one book to the next.

Weiner: Yes, barely. The question is how does this work - writing a
book that takes years. How can you afford to do it? The answer is that
publishers recognize that problem and if they really like your book pro­
posal, they advance you money against the royalties they hope to make
by the sale of the book. They advance you enough that then you budget
and try to live on that advance while you write the book. But all of your
travel expenses, insurance, and overhead - your kid’s braces - everything
comes out of that advance. So it's a precarious way to make a living. But
it's also one of the most exciting careers I can imagine. I'm very happy to
have been able to do it all this time.

22 23
 Special Thanks |
Hill Lecture Booklets

Previous Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures are available in booklet form.
The School of Journalism and Electronic Media j For a copy, contact the School of Journalism and Electronic Media, University of Tennessee.
IS DEEPLY GRATEFUL TO: ,j
s Society for Technical Communication, East Tennessee Chapter 1989 John Noble Wilford Science as Exploration

1991 Dorothy Nelkin Risk Communication and the Mass Media

Society of Professional Journalists, East Tennessee Chapter
1993 Gina Kolata Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies

FOR ADDITIONAL SUPPORT OP THIS ALFRED AND JULIA Hill LeCTURB 1994 Victor Cohn Reporting—Good and Bad—on Health in America

1996 Jim Detjen Environmental News: Where Is It Going?

1997 Jon Franklin The End of Science Writing

1999 Robert Kanigel The Perils of Popularizing Science

2000 John Noble Wilford Science Journalism Across Two Centuries

2001 Sharon Begley Why Science Journalism Isn’t Science

2002 David Quammen Midnight in the Garden ofFact and Factoid

2003 John Rennie Naysaying the Nincompoops:

On Being a Maven in a Misinformed Era

2004 Paula Apsell What’s Hot, What’s Not in Science Programming

2005 Jonathan Weiner On the Writing o/His Brother’s Keeper:

A Story from the Edge of Medicine

24
TOEUNIVERSITYo/rENNESSEE UT
Michael D. Lemonick

tNeiiiu!^
Iloiv a
Wi’itor T€4l
Difrereiic*e?

Fourteenth
Alfred & Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media
April 4, 2006

School of Journalism and Electronic Media

College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science, society, and the mass media was
established in 1989 by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.

Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949, seven years after the govern­
ment established Oak Ridge to house workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak
Ridger was the first successful privately owned newspaper in the city and marked an
important stage in the transition of Oak Ridge from federal operation to private Michael D. Lemonick
ownership and self-government.

Published by Crank or Cileiiins-

School of Journalism & Electronic Media
College of Communication and Information How a Srieiiro Writer
University of Tennessee I'ell the IHflereiiee?

Serial Editor: Mark Littmann

Jidia G. and Alfred G. Hill Professor
of Science, Technology, and Medical Writing

Editors: Mark Littmann, Marlene Taylor, Bonnie Hufford

Serial Designer: Eric L. Smith

Lecturer, Journalism 6- Electronic Media
and Assistant Director, Student Publications

Serial Design Consultant: Robert Heller

Associate Professor, Journalism & Electronic Media

Crank or Genius - How Does a Science Writer Tell the Difference?

© 2006 Michael D. Lemonick
Publication Authorization Number ROl-2910-0.57-002-08
 Michael D. Lemonick
At the time of his Hill Lecture, Michael U,
Lemonick was a Senior Writer at Time magazine
and had written more than 40 cover stories on a
wide variety of topics in science, medicine, and the
environment, including particle physics, emerging viruses, global warm­
ing, genomics, cosmology, brain chemistry, reproductive technology, and
diet pills.
Before coming to Time in 1988, he was a Senior Editor and Writer
at Science Digest magazine and Executive Editor of Discover magazine.
Lemonick has also written on a freelance basis for Discover (7 cover sto­
ries), Audubon, People, Playboy, and the Washington Post.
He is the author of three books; The Light at the Edge of the
Universe (1993), about the mysteries of the cosmos; Other Worlds (1998),
about the search for life in the universe; and Echo of the Big Bang (2003).
He has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show (PBS), Good Morning America
(ABC), and various CNN programs, as well as many radio shows.
His professional honors include the two American Association for
the Advancement of Science-W'estinghouse Awards for distinguished
magazine writing, the American Institute of Physics Science Writing
Award, the Overseas Press Club's Whitman Bassow Award for interna­
tional environmental reporting, the Dog Writers of America's Maxwell
Award, and the National Arbor Day Foundation Media Award.
In 2007, I^monick became a Contributing Writer at Time to
devote more time to teaching and book writing. He teaches science writ­
ing and astronomy at Princeton University and science writing at
Columbia University and Johns Hopkins LJniversity. He is completing a
scientific biography of legendary astronomer William Herschel.
Lemonick holds a master's degree from the Graduate School of
Journalism at Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics
from Harvard College. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and
daughter.
Crank or Genius -
How Does a Science Writer Tell the Differenced
by Michael D. Lemonick
I am here to talk about cranks and geniuses, and how a science
journalist tells the difference. Crank and genius are not always that dif­
ferent. Those of you who are scientists know this already. I learned it
when I became a science journalist and began writing about things like
the big bang, cosmology, relativity, cancer, and many of the big mysteries
facing science that we are still trying to understand. How to produce
energy in an efficient way. How to solve the problems of pollution and
global warming.
Once you start publishing material about these subjects and you
are quoted in newspapers and magazines as an expert, the letters start to
come in. The letters are from people who have already thought a great
deal about these topics. They have thought about them as much or even
more than the professional scientists who work in these fields. Sometimes
they have thought about them night and day, month after month - you
might say obsessively - and whenever they find somebody who seems to
be interested in these things, they want to get in touch because invariably
their ideas are new, they are surprising, they are outside the mainstream
of science - they have the answers that scientists are looking tor.
These folks think scientists have been traveling down the wrong
road or barking up the wrong tree, and they can set them straight. In fact,
they are really happy to do so. And they want to set me straight as well
because these people not only would like the scientists to stop wasting
their time with the wrong answers, but they want someone like me to
publicize their new and revolutionary ideas and give them the fame they
deserve.
3
 Some scientists just throw these letters out, but some save them.
A friend of mine who is an astrophysicist gets these letters; he doesn’t take
them too seriously. But he told me about another astronomer who just
idly started to collect them and now has a thick file of these letters. Then
he had a brilliant idea. The next letter he got was, let’s say, a new theory
that disproved Einstein. Instead of just putting it in the file, this
astronomer went to his folder of theories that disprove Einstein and out
of the 50 or 60 he had there, he pulled one out. He actually wrote back to
guy with the new theory and said, “Dear Sir, This is not my field of exper­
tise. However, I have a colleague I think you should talk to.” And he
copied down the name and address of the other Einstein disprove!' and
mailed it.
I don’t know what happened after that, but the point is that we get
letters and e-mail like this all the time. Here’s an e-mail I got just a cou­
ple of weeks ago. It says:
The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman
Important Energy Machine Update
for Friday, March 3, 2006
Astounding Test Results
On Wednesday, March 1, 2006, an 8,000-pound Ford F-150 pick­
up truck with extended cab and long bed powered by a Newman
Energy Machine was run for 1 hour 15 minutes nonstop around a
circular track. The battery voltage level measured before the test
run was 43 volts and finished at exactly the same level - 43 volts
- after the 1-hour-15-minute test run. Approximately 30 people
witnessed and documented the event. For more information,
please contact Joseph Newman .. .
Joseph Newman has been touting his energy machine for the past 25 or 30
years and he has astounding results in every test he’s ever run. He applied
for a patent but was turned down on the grounds that perpetual motion
machines violate the laws of physics and are therefore not eligible for
patents. The scientific community is not convinced, but Newman has
never stopped trying.
4 5
I got another letter fiom an outfit called Hunt Aviation which is
promoting the second hundred years of flight. We celebrated the hun­
dredth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ flight in 2003 and now Hunt
Aviation is going to be using fuel-less gravity-powered flight. In the com­
pany’s letter was a nice picture of the fiiel-less gravity-powered airplane.
They are serious and they want you to invest in their company.
We get these things all the time and it’s often very clear just by
looking at what these people have to say that they are what I would call
cranks. “Crank” is not exactly a polite word, but it really describes people
who are obsessed with impossible or far-fetched ideas. These are people
who are just a little bit nutty, and you can tell they are nutty.
How do science writers tell the difference? You tell the difference
when people make claims that are just silly, like Joseph Newman or the
gravity-powered aircraft. The theories are just absurd and you dismiss
them out of hand. One giveaway is when they are scrawled in pencil on
notebook paper. That’s a hint that maybe you are dealing with a crank.
Or when people write and say, “I have no more than a third-grade educa­
tion and I spent my entire career running a truck that pumps out septic
tanks - but I have a new theory of the universe.” That kind of statement
is a giveaway.
But there are other cases when it is not such a giveaway and in
those cases, the science writer or scientist really has a bit more of a prob­
lem. I am looking at the cover of a book whose title starts off The Grand
Unified Theory... Those three words are not necessarily a dead giveaway,
but they are a hint that you might be dealing with somebody a little odd.
Here’s the full title: The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum
Mechanics by Dr. Randell L. Mills.
When you go to the website provided by Dr. Randell L. Mills, you
find out that this grand unified theory is an 800-page book filled with
equations that I can’t understand, which therefore means that I am
impressed by them. The book is a long discourse on the failings of quan­
tum mechanics. Dr. Mills offers his new theory that will correct quantum
mechanics. Mills has the title “Doctor” in front of his name (that’s
impressive), he’s got equations (impressive), and he hasn’t scrawled his
work on a piece of paper (impressive). Moreover, he’s got endorsements
from actual physicists who work for actual universities, and so you start to
think, well, could he have something? And he is a graduate of Harvard
University. Now I also am a graduate of Harvard University, so naturally
I take this very seriously. Many smart people graduated from Harvard
University. I knew some of them. The fact that his doctorate is not a
Ph.D. but a medical degree may give you pause, but doctors are pretty
smart people. They have to go through medical school and cut up cadav­
ers and things. So the question is: how do you know what to make of
someone like this?
Here is this guy who is making rather grand claims. If I tell you
about some of the claims he makes, you might start to wonder. Yet he has
$50 million in startup capital from actual companies you know of. Money
makes it sound serious. Even though he claims he has this radical new
theory, even though many mainstream scientists say it’s crazy, and even
though you are tempted to think that’s good enough for me, it’s not always
the case. Mills’ theories are new, unproven, and still being debated.
I will give you a number of examples in which ideas that seemed
crazy were truly revolutionary. In the 1850s, a Hungarian doctor named
Ignaz Semmelweis worked in a hospital where women went to give birth.
Many of the women got infections - puerperal fever - and died. It was
very dangerous to go to the hospital to have a baby back then. Dr.
Semmelweis got it in his head that if the doctors who were delivering
babies washed their hands after one patient before they saw the next, this
would cut down on infection. He believed doctors carried “particles”
from one patient to another, particular after performing autopsies.
He presented this idea to his colleagues and they laughed him out
of the hospital. It was the stupidest thing they had ever heard. This was
before Louis Pasteur and before the germ theory of disease. Semmelweis
was ahead of his time and had no scientific explanation, so it is under­
standable why the doctors didn’t believe him. But he said. Look, I have
results. I have fewer infections here in my hospital. He had about ten to
twenty percent fewer infections, if fact.
They said. You’re crazy. Get out of here! Even if it were true -
which it’s not - it takes too long to wash between patients. We don’t have
the time. They also were reluctant to admit that they themselves could be
spreading the infections.
So women continued to die in childbirth until joseph Lister in
England started performing antiseptic surgery in 1865 and until Pasteur’s
theory of disease spread by germs was accepted. Finally doctors realized
that Semmelweis, long since dead, was right all along. He had proposed
something that, according to the very strong beliefs of the time, was crazy
6
- and yet he was right. Semiuelweis is now referred to as the Father of
Infection Control.
In 1859 Charles Darwin proposed a theory to explain the great
variety of life forms on Earth. It was elegant and powerful, yet he was dis­
missed as being wrong, not because there was a strong scientific bias
against what he was saying, but because it went against people’s religious
beliefs. He too was denounced as wrong - not exactly crazy but wrong.
Yet today, of course, the theory of evolution is the fundamental concept of
biology.
Another example of someone people thought was wrong but later
found was right is a guy named Alfred Wegener. He was an astronomer,
meteorologist, and adventurer in the first two decades of the 1900s. He
pioneered the use of balloons to study weather, and for a while he and his
brother held the world endurance record in a hot air balloon. He was also
an arctic explorer and make
treks to Greenland to study And they basically said, Alfred,
polar air circulation. you idiot! You know, it’s all very
In 1911 he was read­
pretty, and you have all this nice
ing a scientific paper de.scrib-
ing similarities in fossils on evidence, but Alfred, these are
opposite sides of the Atlantic continents! They weigh trillions of
and noticed that if you look
ton; they’re rock; they’re stuck to
at the eastern coast of the
western hemisphere and the the Earth! How can you move a
western coast of the eastern continent around?
hemisphere, it looks like they
aie puzzle pieces which, if
you could slide them together, would fit remarkably well. At the time it
was believed that land bridges, which had since sunk, e.xplained why the
fossils on the two coasts were so similar.
Scientists had already noticed the obvious - that the continents
seemed to fit together like puzzle pieces - but they didn t have any expla­
nations for this curiosity. Wegener was a very thorough guy, so he did a
little more re.search. He did a lot more research, in fact, and he leained
that not only did the shapes fit together, but corresponding places along
both sides of the Atlantic had very similar geologies. The Appalachians
matched up with the Scottish Highlands, and the rock strata of the Carroo
7
system of South Africa was identical to the Santa Catarina system in first meeting is that no, they didn’t, although that’s what many people who
Brazil. He looked further into the fossils from both coasts, and at the ani­ have their own radical theories believe and say. However, scientists didn’t
mals and plants that had lived there millions of years ago in about the laugh at Einstein. His ideas were well enough thought out and well
same time frame and saw they were very similar. That’s how he came up enough supported by mathematics that, although people didn’t accept
with the idea of drifting continents, or continental drift as it was later them right away, they took them seriously. Elis ideas addressed some
called - the idea that the continents drift about the surface of the Earth. severe problems that physicists were up against, so they didn’t laugh at
He went to the geologists who were the experts on these things Einstein. But they did laugh at Wegener and Semmelweis.
and said. Look what I’ve discovered! And they basically said, Alfred, you
idiot! You know, it’s all very pretty, and you have all this nice evidence, but More recently, they laughed at Barbara McClintock. McClintock
Alfred, these are continents! They weigh trillions of ton; they’re rock; is the botanist and geneticist who proposed the idea that genes could actu­
they’re stuck to the Earth! How can you move a continent around? That’s ally transfer between organisms of the same genus without being mem­
ridiculous! bers of the same species or sexually reproducing. That would explain
Wegener kept gathering some of the evolutionary changes that happened and how new some
Scientists didn’t laugh at Einstein.
more evidence and they species developed. People said .she was crazy; they dismis.sed her as Just
His ideas were well enough thought kept laughing and scoffing completely off the wall. She actually quit publishing her research because
out and well enough supported by at him. He died in 1930, it was met with such skepticism. She turned out to be right and later won
twenty-five years before a a Nobel Prize for her work.
mathematics that, although people
series of discoveries in
didn’t accept them right away, they paleomagnetism and In the 1960s, an astronomer named Vera Rubin measured the
took them seriously. His ideas oceanography and newer rotations of galaxies. She discovered that the outer stars of spiral galaxies
addressed some severe problems
exploration techniques seem were revolving faster than expected around the center of the galaxy
convinced scientists that based on how much mass those galaxies appeared to have. The galaxies
that physicists were up against, so continents do indeed were rotating so fast that, by right, they should have been flying apart -
they didn’t laugh at Einstein. move - and now the theo­ flinging their spiral arms off into space - and yet they weren’t. So she said
ry is accepted and taught. there must be something else there we can’t see, some sort of invisible
You know, there aie peo­ matter whose gravity is holding the galaxies together. She suggested that
ple who were alive, maybe the answer was dark matter. The concept had actually been proposed ear­
in this room, when Wegener was struggling in vain to have this idea lier, but she had found the evidence for it. People said. Dark matter, invis­
accepted. Now the concept of plate tectonics is in the textbooks, and we ible stuff: you’re crazy. They really were not very nice to her. And she
have an idea how the continental plates move. But it is clear that the con­ turned out to be right. Though astronomers do not understand it yet,
tinents do move around the Earth and always have. they estimate that 90 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter.

So, when Joseph Newman comes to me with his energy machine
or when Randell Mills comes to me with his grand unified whatever-that-
was, he is able to say, “Okay, you know, I sound crazy. I agree I sound
crazy, but remember, they laughed at Wegener. They laughed at
Semmelweis, and they laughed at Einstein.”
I teach a course on this topic to freshmen at Princeton University.
The title of the cla,ss is They Laughed at Einstein and what we learn in the
In the 1980s, Barry Marshall, an Australian physician, had the
idea that ulcers, which everyone knew were caused by stress and should be
treated by giving people antacids, weie actually caused by bacteria. I was
talking to a physician who was at a meeting when Marshall proposed this
idea, and they literally laughed at him. They thought this was the funni­
est thing they ever heard because they didn’t think bacteria could sui'v'ive
in the acidic envii onment of the stomach. But Mai shall was convinced he

8 9
was right and he isolated what he thought was the bacterium responsible
for ulcers (a new genus called Hcliobacter pylori), and they still laughed.
So he mixed up a batch of the bacteria and drank it. A week later he began
exhibiting painful symptoms of gastritis. Then he took antibiotics and
cured himself. He proved his theoiy was correct. It is now completely
accepted that many, if not most, ulcers are caused by bacteria.
Stanley Prusiner, an American doctor, was convinced that certain
brain-destroying diseases, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease,
a disease in sheep called scrapie, and a disease prevalent in New Guinea
called kuru all had very similar symptoms. But when researchers looked
for the viruses that caused these diseases, they couldn’t find them. They
assumed they must be '‘slow viruses.”
Prusiner and other scientists, searching for these elusive viruses,
put diseased brain matter through sieves so fine they could trap viruses -
and what came through the sieves was still contagious. They boiled it. It
remained contagious. They beat it up in all sorts of ways. And it was still
virulent.
So Prusiner said. Okay, 1 don’t think these are viruses. Instead, I
think they are a kind of protein that is folded up the wrong way and
induces other proteins to do the same. These misfolded proteins collect
in the brain and cause the brain to deteriorate. Prusiner called these
destructive proteins prions, from protein and infection. Many scientists
initially thought the idea of prions was ridiculous. In 1997 Prusiner won
the Nobel Prize for his theory.
It’s clear that science has a long record of making fun of, ridicul­
ing, and driving out people whose ideas go against the conventional wis­
dom, and that is great ammunition tbi' crazy people or for people who are
deluded, who have ideas that are just wrong. People come to me and say,
“They laughed at Einstein, Prusiner, Marshall, Wegener” - the whole long
list. I don’t dare let this list get out because they would have even more
ammunition. “So,” they say, “you should listen to me too. Yes, I know its
a long shot, but what if I’m right? You will miss the story of the centui7.”
Thus I have to make decisions about these things. So how do I do it?
The way I do it. I’ll admit to you right now, is imperfect because,
first of all, 1 am not trained as a scientist myself Second, even if I were, I
would be trained in one area of science and these theories run the gamut
from energy production to physics to biology to cancer, so I couldn’t be
10
an expert in all of them anyway. I also know that if I were an expert, I
would have a vested interest in w'hat I had learned.
One of the things you hear from scientists when these offbeat the­
ories are proposed is: If this person is right, then everything I’ve ever
learned is wrong. That's not necessarily an argument, but it explains why
people are not willing to embrace these theories, and every so often some­
thing does come along that shows that everything you learned was wrong.
So, as a journalist, I have to rely on a few rules of thumb. One rule
of thumb is that cranks invariably have a grand unified theory of some­
thing. No crank will expend the crank energy to come up with a radical
new theory proposing that instead of 432 species of dung beetles in North
Africa, there are actually 433. Even if it’s true, almost no one will care.
Cranks aren’t going to waste their time on small discoveries, so they are
always proposing something grandiose. If it’s grandiose, my antennae go
up. If the word Einstein or relativity appears anywhere, my antennae go
up because that is a very pow­
erful clue. That’s something One rule of thumb is that cranks
that people who are cranks
invariably have a grand unified
latch onto. Cranks are
attracted to grand and well- theory of something.
known theories. So destroy­ No crank will expend the crank
ing relativity is a big lure.
energy to come up with a radical
Creating free energy is a big
one. Solving a grand problem new theory about the number of
or a huge mystery is always dung beetle species.
very appealing. That might
be your first hint.
Another hint is when the person has no affiliation. So when I get
a grandiose theory from someone who lists his affiliation as “independent
thinker,” that’s a giveaway that something might be wrong.
If the person’s theory is about physics and it’s not backed up by
any sort of mathematics - even though 1 can’t understand the mathemat­
ics - that’s a clue.
If the person has no track record, that’s a clue. If the person has
not attempted to publish his theory in a peer-review journal, that s a clue,
because the standard test of whether a scientific idea or discovery is valid
is to show it to your peel's and to have them evaluate it. So if the pereon
11
hasn’t done that or has tried to do that and failed miserably, that’s a give­
away.
Another thing I do is talk to people that I trust, people who have
generally proven to be right - scientists in that field of study - and see
what they think. If they start laughing and falling on the floor, I have a
sense that this might be something not to pay too much attention to.
But in the end, none of these techniques is absolutely foolproof I
can tell you about an incident that happened in the early years of the 20^*^
centuiy when the great British mathematician G. H. Hardy received a 10-
page letter from a clerk in India. The letter was from someone who appar­
ently had no formal education in math, and it said, I have been doing
mathematics on my own - you know, an “independent thinker” - and I
wonder if you’d take a look at it. The letter contained a long list of theo­
rems and was the man’s third attempt to have his work validated by
Cambridge mathematicians. Hardy looked at the theorems and saw that
they could indeed be new and important information.
It turns out this uneducated clerk had gotten his hands on a book
containing thousands of unsolved mathematical problems when he was
only 16. He started working his way through them and solved a large
number of them. And Hai dy said. You know, I don’t care if he’s unaffili­
ated or some might think he’s a crank. 1 wouldn’t care if he wrote on the
back of an envelope. He has done some important work. In math, you
know, you have either done it or you haven’t, and this young man had
done it. He used somewhat unconventional - informal - notations and
invented his own techniques, but he had actually solved some of these
problems.
The Indian’s name was Srinivasa Ramanujan, and in 1914 Hardy
brought him to Cambridge to study with him. Ramanujan was just 27.
They collaborated on problems for five years and learned fiom each other
- Hardy’s rigorous analysis and Ramanujan’s intuition and induction.
Ramanujan died of tuberculosis when he was .32.
But here’s a case where all the warning signals were there. Yet
somebody happened to take the time to read what the would-be mathe­
matician had to say. If Hardy had not considered Ramanujan’s letter and
equations, if he had assumed Ramanujan was a crank and never respond­
ed to that letter, Ramanujan’s genius would probably never have been dis­
covered. Ramanujan’s contributions to mathematics are so extraordinary
12
that Nova did a special on him in 1988, Robert Kanigel wrote a book
about him in 1991, and two films on his life are currently in production.
Scientists have recently found applications for his work in crystallography
and string theory.
Another hallmark of cranks is that even if they have credentials,
their crank theories are often completely in different areas. With that in
mind, let me mention Joseph Nagyvary. He’s a Hungarian emigre, pro­
fessor of biochemistry at Texas A&M University. So he has legitimate cre­
dentials. But Nagyvary is also an amateur violinist, and he believes that he
has solved the secret of Stradivarius. People have been trying to figure out
for three hundred years
what makes a Stradivarius But Nagyvary is also an amateur
violin or a violin by
violinist, and he believes that he
Giuseppe Guarneri or some
of the other great violin- has solved the secret of
makers fiom Cremona, Italy Stradivarius... a grandiose,
at the time so much better
unsolved question. I have it, says
than other violins. Some
have theories about the way this guy with a heavy
they are carved: they have Transylvanian accent. Nagyvary
taken the violins apart, mea­ sounds like Dracula. And his hair
sured and duplicated every
piece to the hundredth of an sort of flies up and he looks just a
inch, assembled them - and little bit demented. How do you
failed to duplicate the sound evaluate this claim?
of the original. They have
put the violins on machines
to analyze the vibration pat­
terns. They have tried to match the cut of the wood and the type of glue.
Everybody’s got a theory. Nobody has really figured it out. So, a
grandiose, unsolved question. I have it, says this guy with a hea\7
Ti ansylvanian accent. Nagyvary sounds like Dracula. And his hair sort of
flies up and he looks just a little bit demented. How do you evaluate this
claim? I actually did a story on this guy because nobody really does know
the reason for the superiority of Stradivarius violins.
An awkward hallmark of cranks is that their ideas usually sound
plausible. That tends to make you think their wild ideas are worth your
13
attention. But if their ideas sound completely wacko, that’s a hint in the There are a lot more examples, but I think you get the idea. The
other direction. So if somebody comes to me and says, “1 discovered that answer to how a science writer tells the difference between a crank and a
the big bang was actually a firecracker set off at a Chinese New Year cele­ genius is to use the same reasoning you would use whenever you are
bration and somehow went into a time warp and became the universe, I unsure of a person’s credibility. No special talent. There’s experience:
know that’s a little extreme. But what Nagy\'ary said was: I’ve studied the You’ve seen people with ideas come and go. There’s the advice of others
wood and I’ve studied the history of that region. I’ve learned that the who know more than you. But in the end there’s always going to be some­
lumber in those days was felled up high in the mountains but then it was body like Nagyvary or one of these historic figures I’ve told you about
floated down the rivers and it sat in the lagoons in Venice for up to a year. who’s going to turn out to be right despite what everyone else says.
So 1 think that the soaking of the wood in a brine solution is a part of the
answer because it opens up the pores in the wood. And the other part of That’s partly what makes science writing so adventurous. When
people tell me, “If you don’t publicize me, you’ll miss the biggest story of
the answer is that I know that the furniture makers of the time in that area
the century,” I have to accept that possibility. But that’s okay because I’d
used varnishes that were made from fr uit extracts because they were very
shinyand looked good. The second part of my theory is that if you made rather do that than look like a fool.
something like this shiny,
/ talked to a physicist at Texas brittle varnish, it would actu-
A&M who works with Nagyvary, iilly make the surface of the
violin vibrate more brilliantly.
helping him analyze the sound...
This physicist is also an amateur So Nagyvar)' had these
violinist. I took him aside and plausible ideas. He made some
violins and he’s had experts
said, So is this guy crazy or not?
play them. Some exj^erts say
He said, Well, yeah, he might be he’s got the secret; they’re as
completely insane, but he makes a good as a Stradivarius. Others
say they’re terrible; they hate
great violin, so I don’t care.
his violins. It was veiy much a
matter of personal taste.

So I wrote the article. This is one of those stories where we don’t

know the answer yet, and we may never know the answer because
Nagyvary is trying to recreate some historical thing that’s long since dis­
appeared. We may have to wait for Nagy\'ary’s violins to be 300 years old
before we’ll know. I talked to a physicist at Texas A&M who works with
Nagyvary, helping him analyze the sound on an oscilloscope and by other-
means. This physicist is also an amateur violinist. I took him aside and
said. So is this guy crazy or not? He said. Well, yeah, he might be com­
pletely insane, but he makes a great violin, so 1 don’t care. Who cares if
he’s right or not?

15
14

AUDIENCE
JHicliael D. Lemonick
Question: Who are yowr favorite science writers? Also, what are
your favorite sources for your science articles?
Lemonick: Excuse me while I go get the Hill Lecture program note
because the truth is that many of the people who have come here to deliv­
er Hill Lectures are among my favorite science wa iters. Other people I like
are not always science writers per se. They are people who write about a
lot of things. There’s Richard Preston, who wrote a book called The Hot
Zone about the ebola virus. He’s currently writing about climbing huge
trees, but when he writes about science, he writes about it beautifully and
poetically and really engagingly.
John MePhee is another of my science writing heroes who is not
strictly a science writer. There are many more superb science writers, but
that’s enough for now.
The other question was what sources do I use? I use any source I
can think of. I use scientific journals. 1 use casual conversations with sci­
entists. I’ll call up a scientist that I know and say, What are you and your
16
colleagues in your field talking about that’s going to be making news in a
month or two? I go to conferences when 1 can and just listen to what peo­
ple are talking about in the halls, because that is often what’s going to be
big news in the field. 1 steal ideas from other publications. We all do this.
If I see something interesting in The New York Times or The New Yorker-
as long as it’s not Newsweek (you know I wouldn’t stoop that low) - I
won’t just redo the same article but I will try to find a way to take it anoth­
er step. I’m not shy about admitting that I didn’t think of it but it’s a great
idea. I get ideas from talking to people who have nothing to do with sci­
ence or science writing, like noticing that a bunch of people at a party are
saying: Have you heard about that new vitamin that’s supposed to make
you do something? If people are talking about it, it means they’re inter­
ested in knowing the truth, and the truth is rarely what they think it is.
That gives me a chance to learn and write about that topic.
Question: Why did Time magazine and other mass media outlets
publicize and give such credibility to cold fusion? Couldn’t you see it
was nonsense?
Lemonick: Cold fusion. What happened was that in 1989, Stanley
Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two chemists at the University of Utah,
announced at a press conference that they had managed to do fusion on a
tabletop at room temperature with very cheap and simple equipment.
This came out on a Thursday night, I think, and we had to do a story
because our deadline was Friday and, if true, this discovery was very
important. By the way, this is another feature of crank science: If it’s true,
it’s really important. All those criteria that I talked about came into play.
I said, do these guys have an affiliation? Yeah, University of Utah. They’re
real scientists at a real institution. Do they have a track record? Yeah, they
are eminent in their field, which happens to be chemistry and not nuclear
physics, but still they’ve got the backing of their university. They are mak­
ing an announcement that is hard to accept, but you can’t just dismiss it.
They said. Here are the results; this is what we measured; this is what we
think is happening. 1 called up people I knew in the fusion community
and they were cautious because they weren’t convinced it was not com­
plete crap. But anything negative they said could be interpreted as sour
grapes on their part because they’d spent billions and failed so far - and
these clowns are chemists, not physicists. So they told me that, if cold
fusion were real, it would violate everything they knew about nuclear
17
physics. But they hadn’t seen the paper, they hadn’t seen the apparatus, so
they couldn’t say cold fusion wasn’t true. That’s what we went with.
In the following few weeks, many physicists tried to reproduce the
experiment because, if true, it promised a new, cheap, unlimited source of
energy. Some people seemed to succeed, but never reliably. Others failed,
so it started to look like maybe cold hision wasn’t true. In science, if
you’ve done an experiment and claim a discovery, you then have to
explain exactly how you did it so others can reproduce it to test your
claim. But Pons and Fleischmann refused to say exactly how they did it.
It was a little suspicious. There are patent issues, they said. Well, that’s
very dubious.
After about four or five weeks, even more scientists said. Well, it s
not working. At that point the University of Utah scientists said. Oh, but
you have to let it run for, like, two months. So the other scientists said.
Oh, now you tell us.
After five or sLx weeks of this, the broad consensus in the physics
community was that Pons and Fleischmann were either mistaken or
frauds, or started out mistaken and then evolved into frauds as they
became unwilling to back down. And now, in 2006, 17 years later, there
are still active researchers who claim that they are generating energy by
cold fusion. The original two guys. Pons and Fleischmann, claim they
have had new, even more amazing results, but they prefer not to talk about
them because they are kind of shy about it. The general consensus is that
it’s nonsense. There’s a minority who say that what Pons and Fleischmann
claim may not be tine but still there’s something going on there that they
don’t understand. There’s some kind of reaction that sometimes produces
energy. I’m guessing cold fusion will go away. However, it might be one
of those cases where, despite everything, it turns out to be true. But I
wouldn’t buy stock.
Question: How do you decide what stories you’d like to write about -
or does Time tell you what stories to write?
Lemonick: It’s a little of both. I’m expected to come up with things 1
would like to write about, and the editors and correspondents and other
people are also expected to come up with ideas. I’m not out there inde­
pendently just saying, Here’s what I m writing about this week; print it. In
fact, we’ve had some of our best ideas come from very surprising sources,
such as this guy who draws our maps. Time does its own maps when writ­
18
ers have stories that need them. But this artist is intellectually very curi­
ous, and every so often he’ll raise his hand in a meeting and say. I’ve been
reading about this new planet they’ve found and it’s really interesting. We
should do a story. And the editor-in-chief says. That’s a great idea. So
ideas come from all directions. There’s no rule of thumb about this. Well,
yeah, the editor-in-chief’s opinion counts more than anyone else’s.
Question: Can you make it in science writing by specializing, say, in
astronomy, or is it necessary to be broad?
Lemonick: I have to be broad, unfortunately. If they let me write about
astronomy and physics and nothing else, I would be really happy, but the
appetites for those stories is limited at Time, and the pressure to put out
medical and health stories is enormous, so we have three full-time science
writers. One of them does medicine all the time. The other two of us do
medicine a lot of the time, and the rest is reserved for astronomy, physics,
technology, and othei' stuff. So it’s unfortunate, but I’m glad I get to wTite
about the things I really care about even some of the time, which not
everybody does.
Question: How do you feel about the journalistic creed of not show­
ing your story to your sources before publishing? If you’re writing
about something that the scientists have not really figured out yet, how
do you make sure that you don’t say exactly the opposite of what they
meant?
Lemonick: That’s a very good question. In journalism there is an
unspoken rule that you never show your story to your sources before it’s
published, and that is more true for newspapers than it is for magazines.
It’s a holdover, I think, from the time w'hen most of the stories you wrote
had a political aspect to them. Show a politician something that doesn’t
have the right spin and the politician will say, I never said that. You got it
completely wrong. I’m going to sue you. I’m going to put you in jail.
Scientists aren’t quite that bad. Well, some of them are.
Among science writers, that creed is not as rigorously adhered to
as you might think, especially outside newspapers. Many of us show por­
tions of our stories to scientists, portions where we are explaining their
work, because I would much rather take the risk of a scientist complain­
ing to me than the risk of saying something completely stupid in public.
19
 Advisory Committee for the Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures
So we are looser about that creed than you might think. However, we
don’t show quotes because sometimes people say things that they would
Dorothy Bowles Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media
love to have said differently, and it’s not really fair to let them do that. But
to let them clean up an explanation so that it actually makes sense, that s Janies A. Crook Professor & Director Emeritus, School of Journalism & Electronic
Media
okay
George Everett Professor Emeritus of Journalism
Question: How do you prevent yourself from editorializing on a sci­ Peter Gross Professor & Director, School of journalism & Electronic Media
ence issue that you’re writing about that has ramifications for funding
Russel Hirst .Associate Professor of English;
from Congress or international implications? What responsibility do Director, Technical Communication Piogram
you have to the public?
Bonnie Hufford Instructor, Journalism & Electronic Media

Lemonick: The responsibility I have to the public is to approach any
story with an open mind, listen to what people have to say about the sub­
ject, and then come to a conclusion based on my intelligence, experience,
and the persuasiveness of the arguments about what the truth is, and then
say what I think the truth is.
Kelly Leiter Meeman Professor Emeritus of Journalism;
Dean Emeritus of the College of Communications
Mark Littmann Professor, Julia G. & Alfred G. Hill Chair of Excellence
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing
Dwight Teeter Professor of journalism & Electronic Media;
former Dean of the College of Communications

Question: Do you do sanity checks? As a former government scien­ Carol Tenopir Professor of Information Sciences; Director of Research,
College of Communication & Information
tist, 1 saw a lot of people who have these “great ideas.” A sanity check is
to go to colleagues who have expertise in that field for their appraisal. Joseph Trahern, Jr. Alumni Distinguished Professor of English

John Noble VVilford Science Correspondent and Senior Writer, The New York Times
Lemonick: If somebody is proposing something that is within the
Michael Wirth Professor & Dean, College of Communication & Information
mainstream of science. I’m less likely to do that. But if somebody is telling
me something that is pretty wild, of course I’ll go to others and say. What
do you think of this person?
I’ll give you one last example. I got a call from a book editor at
Houghton Mifflin who knows me and trusts me, and she said, I just had
this guy in here with an idea for a book about time travel, and he says he’s
a professor at Princeton, a physicist, but he’s very odd. He may have
escaped from an asylum. Have you heard of this guy? And I said. Oh yeah,
he’s absolutely legitimate; you must let him write the book. He’s brilliant,
he’s great, he’s funny, and he’s nuts - but in a good way. And she said okay.
She let him write the book. I was really enthusiastic that she was con­
vinced. So, yes, I do sanity checks, and I’ve even had people use me to do
sanity checks on others.
Oh, the book? The book was called Time Travel in Einstein’s
Universe by J. Richard Gott. Great book, crazy guy.
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 What a
Reporter Learnsl
Dylan, Coltrane,

Journalisml
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as Music

Robert Krulwich

Fifteenth
Alfred & Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media
March 26,2007

School of Journalism and Electronic Media

College of Communication and information
TOHUNIVERSITYofTENNESSEE IUT
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science, society, and the mass media
was established in 1989 by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.

Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949, seven years after the govern­
ment established Oak Ridge to house workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak
Ridger was the first successful privately owned newspaper in the city and marked an
important stage in the transition of Oak Ridge from federal operation to private
ownership and self-government.
What a
■!
Published by
Reporter Learns
School of Journalism & Electronic Media
College of Communication and Information
University of Tennessee
y/an, Coltrane,
Serial Editor: Mark Littmann
fnbawamba:
Julia G. and Alfred G. Hill Professor
of Science, Technology, and Medical Writing Journalism
Editors: Mark Littmann (

and
Dorothy Bowles
as Music
Professor Emerita ofJournalism and Electronic Media

Serial Designer: Eric L. Smith

Lecturer, Journalism & Electronic Media
and Assistant Director, Student Publications

Serial Design Consultant: Robert Heller Robert Krulwich

Associate Professor, Journalism & Electronic Media

What a Reporter Learns from Dylan, Coltrane, and Chumbawamba:

Journalism as Music
© 2007 Robert Krulwich
Publication Authorization Number ROl-2910-057-003-09
 Robert Krulwich
TV Guide called Robert Krulwich “the
most inventive reporter in television.” He creates
feature stories on science and other complex sub­
jects for ABC News and National Public Radio.
New York magazine describes him as “the man who simplifies without
being simple.”
Here are some of the awards Krulwich has won:
• Natiotud Emmy Awardfor a television special about privacy on the
Internet (1995)
• National Emmy Awardfor a television special on the cultural history cf
the doU Barbie (1998)
• American Associationfor the Advancement ofScience Excellence
in Television Awardfor a Nova special on the human genome (2001)
• Columbia University Alfred I. duPont Awardfor his investigative series
Frontline on PBS (1993)
• National Cancer Institute Extraordinary Communicator Award (2000)
Krulwich holds a bachelor’s degree (1969) from Oberlin College
in United States history and a law degree (1974) from Columbia
University. But he left legal practice after two months to become a jour­
nalist, covering the Watergate hearings for Pacifica Radio. In 1976, he
became Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone magazine. In 1978, he
joined National Public Radio. In 1984, he moved to CBS News and spent
ten years there before joining ABC News in 1994.
In addition (somehow) to his work as Special Correspondent for
ABC, he served as host and managing editor for PBS’s series Nova
scienceNow from 2004 to 2006, and in 2005, he returned to National
Public Radio as Correspondent for its Science Unit.
Krulwich lives in New York City with his wife Tamar Lewin, a
national reporter for the New York Times, and their two children.
^ What a Reporter Learns
w from Dylan, Coltrane, and Chumbawamba:
11 Journalism as Music
by Robert Krulwich
My subject today is journalism as a form of music. That doesn’t
mean I am going to sing for the whole hour, but there will be some
singing. I hope to show you though that when I choose to do a story, I am
very, very, very aware of how it is going to sound, by which I mean the
beats, the pauses, the noises, the flow of it, because I am trying to capture
an idea.
Most of my stories are not about what the president said today or
whether the Vols won last night at Florida. My stories are more about
ideas. The problem with ideas on television is that ideas are invisible -
and TV is a visual medium. That poses an immediate problem: what do
you put on the screen?
My stories are usually multilayered, a little bit subtle, a little hard
to explain, so the smartest thing you can do, I find, is to think like a com­
poser so that when you choose to speak the words that you have written
down, you think: Shall I do it loud, shall I do it soft, shall I do it cool, shall
I do it quietly, shall I do it happily, shall I do it sadly? These are conscious
decisions so that when you put your story together, every pause you make
- every beat - is fashioned to make the idea as clear as it can possibly be
and as sticky as it can possibly be so it will stick in your head.
So what I am going to talk to you about this evening is a number
of the elements - the musical elements - available to reporters in the
broadcast media. There’s your voice, there’s the flow of things, there’s the
way you splice the elements together. Then I am going to tell you a little
bit about how I manage to place these stories on television where they are
not always welcome. Then I am going to talk a little bit about how you can
take the same story and put it on the radio. You’ve got to know your medi­
um. You’ve also got to anticipate the audience’s mood, which is very
3
tricky. Finally, I am going to show you a science story that is so complex,
we figured it couldn’t be done. But we tried - and you’ll be the judge of
how well we did.
Let’s begin with voice. The first example I am going to play for
you is a radio piece about the musical note B flat. A few years ago, I was
on a plane and the man next to me said that he was in the golf ball
retrieval business, which struck me as an interesting line of work. He
explained that golf ball retrieval means that you pull balls out of the water
holes. Actually, you make a deal with a caddie to fish the balls out and you
pay him 10 cents a ball. Then you sell them to the Japanese for 25 cents a
ball.
There are problems in any business, but the problems in this busi­
ness were a little out of the ordinary. There were alligators in the water
holes. You can’t put teenagers into a water hole where there is an alligator
because something might happen and the parents would get angry. So
this businessman called the Alligator Removal Man. And this Alligator
Removal Man had a very strange technique.
Our conversation and arrangements got very complicated, but at
the end of the day, I was talking to the Alligator Removal Man and he told
me a curious thing about alligators. So curious that I found myself near a
swamp in Florida with a full high school marching band because I want­
ed to see what would happen if I played a B flat to a group of male gators.
The Alligator Removal Man claimed that alligators interpret B flat as the
sound of an aggressive male, so I got a tuba player to blast out a B flat that
every male alligator in the neighborhood would answer with a roar. I
wanted to capture that on film. It would sound, well, neat... if it hap­
pened. No one had tested this proposition in the field. So I thought, why
not? In the process we could learn a little more about sound, animal
behavior, experimental design.
But you’ve got to understand the television business. Some peo­
ple who turn on the television will watch anything. You can broadcast a
Yule log burning - really - and keep about 5 percent of people watching.
And then there’s a whole bunch of other people, usually male, who just
click, click, click looking for something to watch. It makes an enormous
difference to your ratings if you stop half of these butterfly-thumb-click­
ing people and hold them for 414 to 6 minutes, which is the ratings unit.
The Nielsen devices go “beep,” and all those people count.
This particular piece about an alligator actually did pan out. We
found that some alligators in a swamp can’t hear a B flat. But alligators in
4 5
a concrete pool - such as those in roadside attraction zoos up and down
Florida’s highways - burst into an enormous combined roar, which was
extremely exciting. And it kept me very interested in the subject of B flat.
After we broadcast the alligator story on ABC, people told me
other B flat stories. I began to collect B flat stories. B flat is a note that
comes up in nature over and over again.
I could have gone on the air and said, “Good morning everybody.
Here are three interesting things about B flat. 1. Buh buh buh buh. 2.
Buhbuhbuh. 3. Buh buh buh buh.” But I wanted the idea to be memo­
rable and I wanted to point out how strange it was, so I thought it might
make a good cantata. I had a friend who used to work with me as a prop
assistant but was now working in a jingle house in Los Angeles. I called
him up and said, “You have a friend who composes, right?” He said yes.
I said, “Could he give me a musical package in which we could sing about
B flat, then leave me a space, then we would come back and sing about B
flat some more, then he would leave me a space, then we could sing about
B flat, then he would leave me a space, and then we’d conclude?”
He goes, “What?”
So this story made Morning Edition on National Public Radio a
few weeks ago. This is what happens when you take an idea that is barely
coherent and give it its own architecture.’
JOSH KURZ and ROBERT KRULWICH: Here you go.
(Singing)
f Have you heard about B flat?
That special magic frequency that
Is found around in the world?
It abounds.
There’s something universal about B flat.
VOICE #1: Start the story.
KURZ: Yeah, start us off, Robert.
KRULWICH: All right, then. I read that scientists at the American
Museum of Natural History once found that if you play a B flat to a male
alligator...
VOICE #1: How does one do that?
’This story was meant to be heard, not read. To hear it, go to the search engine on your computer and enter b-flat,
KRULWICH: With a tuba.
NPR, Krulwich - and you can listen to the story online.
KURZ: Of course, a tuba. KRULWICH: Okay, now we’re going to put our mike into the corner.
KRULWICH: Absolutely. So I asked a tuba player, Phil Porter of the Now listen very, very closely.
Cyprus Lake High School Marching Band in Florida, to play a B flat to a (Sound of echo.)
pit of alligators. We did this for ABC Television. He did it once. KRULWICH: The corner has just grabbed hold of Mr. Fripp’s tone. His
(Sound of tuba playing.) B flat has just escaped.
KRULWICH: Then he did it a second time. FRIPP: You can even hear my voice, right. And that’s how I discovered
(Sound of tuba playing.) this. You’re just talking and you - wow, what is that weirdness jumping
KRULWICH: And indeed, when the alligators heard the B flat... out at me from the wall. Oh!
(Sound of alligators bellowing.) KRULWICH: That weirdness is a B flat that used to belong to Mr.
KRULWICH: ... they began ... Fripp, but no more.
(Sound of alligators bellowing.) FRIPP: This is Glenway Fripp.
KRULWICH: ... to bellow. VOICE #1: Thanks, Glenway. Anyway, speaking of resonance, did you
(Sound of alligators bellowing.) know that I can make my digestive tract resonate in the key of B flat?
KRULWICH: Presumably, they mistook the B flat for an invading alli­ GROUP: What?
gator. KURZ: That sounds difficult. Did you have to practice?
KURZ: Just when they hear B flat? VOICE #1: This is a morning show. I don’t see how this is universal.
KRULWICH: That’s right, just B flat. You play male gators a middle C, KURZ: If we were universal, we’d be talking about the universe. But
you play them a G sharp, they just sit there. But if you are a gator, there we’re just talking about Earth. Robert, why don’t you give us something
is something about a B flat that makes you want to bite the tuba. that’s not as earthly that has to do with B flat?
KURZ: All this talk of B flat made me want to bite a tuba. GROUP: What?
KURZ and KRULWICH: (Singing) VOICE #1: Yes.
Have you heard about B - what - flat? KRULWICH: Very well. Far from Earth in 2003 astronomers found a
A special magic frequency that black hole, 250 million light years away, sending waves through a cluster
Even the reptiles reviled, of gas. When they turned those waves into what for us would be a musi­
And respond to it wild cal note, they found that black holes, in effect, hum. And this black hole
By croaking loudly in B flat. was humming in ...
KURZ: All right, Robert, what’s next? KURZ: Don’t say, let me guess ...
KRULWICH: Next is the story of Glenway Fripp, a piano tuner in KRULWICH: WeU .. .
Woods Hole, Massachusetts. One day, Mr. Fripp was climbing some KURZ: Bflat.
stairs and was humming roughly in B flat. When he hit a landing, he KRULWICH: Exactly.
noticed that his hum had somehow got away from him. So he wasn’t KRULWICH: Yes. B flat, 57 octaves below middle C.
humming, but his hum was still there, bouncing off the walls without KURZ: Wow, that’s low.
him. And Glenway felt, well, this corner seems to be shaped to hold a B KRULWICH: Very low, very low.
flat. And we said could you do this again? KURZ: Sounds like this - hmmm.
GLENWAY FRIPP: So we’re going to walk into this corner. I’m going to KRULWICH: No. A little bit lower.
be singing B flat. And all of a sudden, my voice will disappear and all (Sound of humming.)
you will hear is the resonance, because the resonance is almost equal to KRULWICH: No, lower ...
my voice. And the note we’re searching for is somewhere around this - KURZ: Hmm.
hmmm. KRULWICH: Lower.

6 7
VOICE #1: Go lower.
KRULWICH: For whatever reason, that black hole was humming the B
flat - yes, very low - but for 2.5 billion years.
KURZ: Two-point-five billion years. That’s a long time to be humming
the same thing over and over again.
KURZ and KRULWICH: (Singing)
Have you heard of B flat?
That special magic frequency that
Is found all around.
What a sound.
It’s profound.
There’s something universal about B flat.
There’s something universal about Bflat.^
I want to explain how we did that. I called Josh Kurz, my Los
Angeles friend and colleague, and sent him my narrative on tape. I said
now go ahead and write the cantata part, then I wrote my part. He then
said, “Maybe I should scat into it like in a Vaudeville routine.” He sent his
voice doing the things that you heard; I then recorded my voice over his.
The entire thing was done transcontinentally. We just mailed each other
all the parts and I put them together in New York.
We did a story together last week about Caesar’s last breath. He
composed it on his end and I just sent all my stuff to him. It’s amazing to
be able to work across big distances and time differences. And it’s getting
easier all the time. There is no bandwidth problem whatsoever. He sends
me the music; I send it back. Rodgers and Hammerstein had to visit each
other to collaborate. Now it’s all waves through the ether.
The B flat song was sung in a sense at two levels: it was literally
sung and then those riffs between me and him were added to keep your
ear bouncing. It’s different from traditional news journalism. Originally
when the BBC invented how to talk about the news of the real world, they
didn’t want the audience to think that they took sides. They wanted to
have a strong sense of objectivity. So what CBS and NBC and ABC - and
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting
Company - later picked up was the original BBC method of announcing,
which is a deeply intoned “I am Robert Krulwich; this is the news. I am
talking in this deep voice because I want you to know that I have a certain
amount of authority and knowledge and I don’t take sides. And I don’t get
Morning Edition, National Public Radio, February 16,2007.
8 9
out of this voice because if I got out of this voice it would suggest that I am
biased or troubled or have an emotion.”
But the problem was that over time, this idea of the objective
voice, the newscaster’s voice, became so predictable that Jon Stewart, Steve
Colbert, The Anchorman movie, and Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore
Show are all basically riffs making fun of it.
Well, when your newscaster’s voice is being made fun of, it’s time
to do something else. That’s why, as you’ll see when I choose to tell a com­
plex story, I will relax my voice as much as possible on the theory that a
stand-up-tall, slightly frightening subject deserves a softer, relaxed, invit­
ing voice.
That’s the way it works in the restaurant business, depending on
whether you’re trying to run a romantic restaurant or a formal restaurant.
A formal restaurant will put the tabletop about two inches higher than a
romantic restaurant. When you’re at a romantic restaurant with your
spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend, you’ll find your table is slightly lower. If
you put your arms on the table, you’ll lean in at an angle and your fore­
heads will be close together like you’re in love. But if you’re at a banquet
or a state dinner, you’ll be at a higher table with tail-stem glasses and stiffly
folded napkins. If the restaurant goes vertical, that means "This is impor­
tant. Sit up straight.” So in an important story, I do the romantic table
voice to see if I can attract people. I need to because I do stories on sci­
ence and technology for people who don’t like science and technology,
who don’t think they could understand science and technology, who say,
well, I like that stuff, but not while American Idol or South Park or the
Final Four is on - or not while the Weather Channel is on. I need to
seduce them; I need to get them hooked and so I play with expectations.
I do the unexpected, which is what that B flat story was about. Then I
hold their attention with the flow.
The flow is a very interesting sort of thing. Let me tell you anoth­
er story, about a famous Stanford professor named Robert Sapolsky. He’s
a really big guy who studies baboons and neurology. In fact he is so
baboon-looking that he was paid the ultimate compliment by an alpha
male baboon. He had followed this group of baboons around for so long
that one day this alpha baboon went up to the beta and gamma and omega
baboons, and he slapped them all and then came up to Sapolsky and went
SLAP - gave him a good baboon slap. Sapolsky felt, wow. I’ve made it
here, I don’t even need tenure.
Recently, though, Sapolsky discovered that he is growing old
mentally; he’s getting kind of rigid. I’m not going to play you the whole
story, but when you listen to it, I want you to hear how I’m using my voice
to create a kind of a flow. I interviewed Sapolsky, then isolated the cuts
that I wanted to use, then wrote all the things you hear in between. But I
performed this in a very loose, almost jazz-like sort of way. It’s like an
improv. I try to get my voice to literally match his, so I can finish his sen­
tences and he can finish mine, so it becomes a continuous weave. I hope
you keep listening because I don’t want you to know what’s coming next
as you hear it. This is the story of a guy who’s very sad about another guy
who’s working in the front office.
KRULWICH: I only know his first name - it’s Paul - but
when Paul was 21a couple years ago, he became Robert
Sapolsky’s personal secretary, which means he sat outside
Professor Sapolsky’s office at Stanford University’s biology
department.
SAPOLSKY: He was great at what he did. He was terrific, but I realized
one day that he was just utterly irritating me.
KRULWICH: He was polite and he was good on the phone; that wasn’t
the problem.
(Music.)
SAPOLSKY: It was the music he listened to.
KRULWICH: Okay, so he liked Sonic Youth. In a 21-year-old, that’s
excusable.
SAPOLSKY: That wasn’t the problem. The problem was every day he
was listening to new stuff.
(Music.)
KRULWICH: Monday, Minnie Pearl. (Music.) Tuesday, Ludwig von
Beethoven. (Music.) Wednesday, klezmer music. (Music.) Thursday,
Puccini. (Music.) And Friday, pygmy hunting songs. Nah, let’s make it
pygmy love songs.
SAPOLSKY: Nah, everybody listens to pygmy hunting songs. I thought
he was the exception because he liked pygmy love songs.
KRULWICH: There’s your problem.
SAPOLSKY: There was nothing about him that was stuck in any rut
and this was infuriating to me.
KRULWICH: Why?
SAPOLSKY: Well, because at some point I kind of have to sit there and
look at my own 40-year-old self in terms of openness to new experi­
10
ences. It was not a pretty sight.
KRULWICH: No indeed. Sapolsky may be one of America’s most cele­
brated neuroscientists, but adventure-wise, the man is an embarrass­
ment. For example, his favorite music?
SAPOLSKY: Ninety percent of what I’m listening to overall is like this
same tape of Bob Marley’s greatest hits. Like how did I become one of
those people on late night TV where they sell anthologies to you and
you buy them?
KRULWICH: Well, you could say this is what happens to people who
find themselves on the wrong side of 40 years old, but rather than face
his own creeping decrepitude ...
SAPOLSKY: If you’re a scientist what you get to do instead is you can
turn it into a scientific study.
KRULWICH: And that is what he did. This is not about me, he
thought, this is about everybody, and then he decided to find out if there
are specific ages where a typical human being passes from the adven­
ture/novelty stage to the routine and the comfortable and the familiar.
When does that happen? So, to begin, he turned, not surprisingly, to
music.
(Music.)
SAPOLSKY: I called up 50 radio stations throughout the United States
and in each case got a hold of the station manager and asked them the
same two questions: What’s the average age of the music you play and
what’s the average age of the people who listen to it?
KRULWICH: And to help you follow his logic here, I did talk with Don
Daniels. You’re the program director?
DANIELS: Right. 94.9, KCMO. We’re a ‘60s and ‘70s radio station.
KRULWICH: So that’s Elton John, Billy Joel, James Taylor?
DANIELS: Four Tops, Temptations, right.
KRULWICH: And Mr. Daniels told me that in his business, the radio
business, the formula they use is Breakthrough Minus 20. That means if,
say, Billy Joel (Music.) - if Billy Joel had his big breakthrough in, was it
the ‘60s or the ‘70s?
DANIELS: He’s a ‘70s guy; he’s not a ‘60s guy.
KRULWICH: So if Billy Joel was red hot say in 1976, then minus 20
means that his first fans were born about 20 years earlier, around 1956,
because, says Mr. Daniels ...
DANIELS: You know the music you go to high school and college with
becomes the music of your life.
11
KRULWICH: And commercial radio is built on this principle: that
when you are 14 to 21 years old, that’s when you’re wide open to new
music and that’s when you find your lifelong Billy Joel or whatever. The
interest gradually wanes until, Sapolsky learned...
SAPOLSKY: By age 35.
KRULWICH: By age 35, if a hot new musician comes around, no mat­
ter how wonderful she is, most people don’t care. Their window for
musical adventure is closed. (Music.) But you can keep selling Billy Joel
to those ‘50s babies for the rest of their lives. This is our business, says
Atlanta programmer Chris Miller.
MILLER: You know like Homer Simpson saying that, you know, music
achieved perfection in 1974 and ...
KRULWICH: I’d forgotten about Homer Simpson.
MILLER: Yeah.
KRULWICH: Okay, so for music then, the window for adventure opens
from 14 to 21. It’s closed by 35. Now let’s switch categories. Let’s do
food, new food. Sushi for example is still kind of new in the Midwest.
SAPOLSKY: So I called up 50 sushi restaurants in Omaha, Nebraska.
What is the oldest age of somebody who walks in who has never had
sushi, you know, seaweed surrounding raw fish. It turns out there was
an age limit. Unless you have a college-age child who is trying to get you
to eat it, it goes off at a particular age.^
Then he did tongue piercings. He called Maine tongue piercers,
Texas tongue piercers - but he left out San Francisco and New York for
obvious reasons. And it turns out that people nationwide come in for
tongue piercings at 15 and 16, but there was not a single operator he could
find who knew of a tongue piercing after their 24th birthday. When you
hit 24, for some reason the desire to have your tongue pierced just turns
off. And this led to a discussion about biology. What is it about creatures
all over the world that allows novelty to begin at one point and then sort
of disappear?
But notice in the radio story with Sapolsky, in the give and take
there, my voice is kind of a lubricant. I just keep the story moving along,
and it keeps switching and changing and you bring in the music and you
bring in the DJ and it’s all kind of seamless.
So, voice matters and the beats matter and pacing matters, but in
order to really hook your audience, you’ve got to get to the audience,
^All Things Considered, National Public Radio. August 15, 2006.
12
which means you’ve got to get on the air. Now in a newsroom, typically,
particularly in science, you’re competing for limited space or limited air
time, and science stories often lose because they don’t have that urgency
of “20 people killed today.” If they’ve got “The president said today...”
and you’ve got a piece about an ant, they’ve got more urgency.
Newsrooms are not particularly interested in science stories gen­
erally. They’re also wary of them because they are so hard. So I have had
to do strenuous work to get on the air.
Here’s a perfect example. There was a period near the beginning
of the present war in Iraq when we were taking Baghdad, but Saddam
Hussein and his two sons just vanished. All ABC was doing at that point
was the “Where’s Saddam?” story. Where’s Saddam? Where’s Saddam? -
and I had this incredible octopus footage. Somebody sent me octopus
footage that was so hot and so great that I just had to get this octopus
footage on the air, and I kept after Peter Jennings, saying, “C’mon, is
tonight an octopus night?” Finally he looks at me and says, “There is no
night that’s an octopus night because we are looking for Saddam Hussein.”
So I said, “Alright, alright, alright. I’ll do an octopus angle on the Saddam
story.” He looked a little shocked. What I am about to show you is my
desperate attempt to get on the air with my octopus story in the middle of
a war.
KRULWICH: After Saddam and his sons stole more than a
billion dollars, there is talk now that he is searching for a cos­
metic surgeon to disguise himself. Well, Saddam the Dictator
might want to meet Saddam the Octopus because some octo­
puses really know how to disappear, says biologist Roger
Hanlon.
HANLON: This is what octopuses do for a living: they disappear all the
time.
KRULWICH: For example, Roger saw this bush in shallow Caribbean
water. But as he moved closer - now watch the bush. Look at that: it
turns into an octopus. It squirts ink and runs.
HANLON: This is one of the best.
KRULWICH: We’ve got to see this again. Let’s go backwards before it
ran away to when the octopus was all puffed up big and scary. And now,
backwards and in slow motion, watch the eyes. You see how the pig­
ment is changing back to dark, pudgy, and rock color? And the skin, it’s
beginning to pucker. It becomes more rock-like. This is deliberate.
13
HANLON: So as they see algae next to them, they can mimic the algae.
KRULWICH: It’s definitely getting lumpier all over and this is happen­
ing with muscle changes and color changes. How long does this take?
HANLON: It takes less than a second to make any of these changes. So
they can become a rock in less than a second. It’s instantaneous.
KRULWICH: Gone! The octopus and his cousin the cuttlefish - this is
a cuttlefish - are simply, says Roger, the planet’s masters of disguise.
Watch this cuttlefish, nobody does it better. So if plastic surgeons could
figure out what the octopus does, certain people might pay considerable
sums of money, especially for a quick change.
HANLON: I think the octopus can change its appearance as quickly as
any animal on Earth. If you can turn that into plastic surgery, that
would be pretty cool.
KRULWICH: Indeed. Robert Krulwich, ABC News."
All right, so you can’t blame me, right? That’s pretty great footage.
The problem was how to handle Peter Jenning’s face coming out of the
story. I said to him, don’t you give me one of those anchor expressions,
because anchors can really wreck you if they have a condescending atti­
tude about what you do. But I did get the story on the air. When you do
this for a living, you have to be a bit unscrupulous, because I know how
TV and radio work. If you can jump on and get behind the lead story, you
get on.
There are other ways to get on the air. TV and radio are obsessed
by anniversaries, totally obsessed, so if you have a good turkey story, you
can’t get it on in February, you can’t get it on in August, but if you’re
around at the end of November, they’ll take any turkey story, stupid turkey
stories, good turkey stories. You just have to wait for your turn - the
turkey period.
So I will use calendar events to get on TV and talk about the nat­
ural world any time I can. This next example is in a very different context
and in a very different mood. Last September 11, which was the fifth
anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, they said get an
anniversary story about the World Trade Center towers. Same deal - dif­
ferent spirit though. What I did was to use the towers as an occasion to
think about the movement of the planet, about its daily rotation, so this
piece you’re going to see appears to be an anniversary story - it’s TV,
remember - but it’s really about celestial mechanics.
^ABC Evening NewSt May 12, 2003.
14
CHARLIE GIBSON: Finally tonight, on this day after the
9/11 anniversary, we wanted to return one more time to the
place where the Twin Towers once soared a quarter mile into
the sky. As the Sun sets on Ground Zero, one man who
spends his life observing the universe is keenly aware of
something that’s been lost even if no one else noticed. Here’s ABC’s
Robert Krulwich.
KRULWICH: Back five years ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had an apart­
ment in downtown Manhattan just blocks from the famous Twin
Towers.
TYSON: To me as a neighbor, they were just in my backyard.
KRULWICH: And because his day job was running New York’s Hayden
Planetarium, he paid particular attention to the sky and the stars and
that’s how he noticed something about these towers that no one had
noticed before. We all know in late afternoon, as the Sun dipped down
over New Jersey, the towers turned gold in reflective Sun. We all know
that, but astrophysicist Tyson noticed that once the Sun slipped below
the horizon 45 miles away, the shadow cast by the curve of the Earth
took surprisingly long to crawl up the sides of the buildings. The towers
were that tall.
TYSON: What that meant was that the Sun would not set instanta­
neously on the World Trade Towers. In fact if you calculate it you’ll find
that the Sun sets about 1 second later per floor.
KRULWICH: So you could be standing down at the lobby level and
pass into shadow...
TYSON: All of a sudden a brief sense of cold hits you.
KRULWICH: But above you, the Sun was still up and shining, and for
the next 110 seconds you could watch that Sun blink out one floor per
second almost precisely until if you were at the very, very top ...
TYSON: If you were at the top of the building, you had an extra two
minutes of sunlight in your day, simply for being that high above Earth’s
surface.
KRULWICH: So in effect then, these two towers among many other
things were giant sunset clocks that showed us with some precision the
rotation of the Earth. That’s what Tyson saw, and that’s what he misses
now: two buildings in his neighborhood that once on beautiful nights
pointed to the stars. Robert Krulwich, ABC News in New York.
15
GIBSON: And that is World News for this Tuesday.®
Did you see the look on Charlie Gibsons face?
There are a number of things going on here simultaneously. First
of all, in musical terms, when you compare the Twin Towers piece and the
octopus piece, the Twin Towers story was very soft and very quiet and
very legato because its an elegy. I did the voice that way, very quietly, and
it was almost scored. Visually the Sun is setting and it’s about sunset and
goldenness and quiet. In contrast, the octopus piece is bright, it’s upbeat,
it’s vivace. It’s done with a sportscaster’s kind of energy. In some ways it
even sounded like a sportscast because it was “Let’s go to the videotape”;
“Do the slow-mo”; “Watch the skin here for the pucker.”
They seem like very, very different pieces, but when you think
about it, these are both stories about skin: the glass skin of the World
Trade Towers turns out to have this quality of ticking off the sunset. What
you mostly see in that piece is sunshine on glass. The skin is the story in
this piece. And in the octopus piece, it’s their malleable skin. So they are
both skin stories.
They are also both puzzle stories. You discover something sur­
prising. For the World Trade Towers, there’s this clock-like effect. The
110 floors are like ticks of a clock and the story shows you how. In the
octopus piece, the anemones on the rock turn out not to be anemones on
the rock. Yipes, they’re an octopus. But how did the octopus do that?
That’s another puzzle.
So you’ve got skin stories and puzzle stories. But they really don’t
feel the same because they are different musically. So music matters.
But the next question is, even with music on your side, how much
can you put into a science piece? This is a very touchy question. Any
story that you do could be infinitely complex. How much do you say; how
much do you leave out? Now in these ABC formats - with a minute and
a half or two minutes - there’s not much you can do. But there is some­
thing I do all the time which is a kind of word weighing.
Words on television and words on radio have very different
weights in your ears and in your eyes, so you have to be careful about how
people hear your words. If you’re in the car driving home and I say to you
on your car radio, “Imagine a hill and on the hill is a little white cottage,”
everybody who hears me say that will paint automatically in their minds
®ABC Evening News, September 12, 2006.
16
a hill - their hill; a white cottage - their white cottage. They don’t under­
stand this, but they are my co-authors. They didn’t volunteer. It just hap­
pens automatically because they pick up my nouns, they pick my adjec­
tives, and they paint. And when you’re inside people’s heads, you can do
all kinds of things.
On television, however. I’m in a box in your living room or in
your kitchen. I’m across the way - you have someone looking for a rain­
coat, you have a cat who is about to tip over the milk - there are many
things going on that you see when you are looking at me in the box. So
you don’t have to look at me. On television, the amount of time that you
are distracted and look away from me is just infinitely more.
You may be chopping carrots while listening to the radio, but
when I’m in your head, I own you. But when you’re chopping carrots and
looking at the television set halfway across the kitchen, I don’t own you at
all. Holding your attention on television is a desperate effort.
Therefore, I’m going to play you a ridiculous piece on China. I
did it on both radio and television. I wanted to do them the same but they
don’t come out the same at all for reasons that you’ll feel. This is the radio
version. It’s a geography story about everything that boys and girls have
told each other forever. It’s called “How to Dig a Hole to China.”
KRULWICH: Let’s do a little experiment. What I’d like you
to do is to look down, straight down to your feet, and I want
you to imagine you have a magic drill in your hand like I have
here in my hand. And now Tm going to drill. Since I’m in
New York City, Tm going to drill first through the pavement
then down through the pipes and then we’ll go through 2,200 miles of
rock down in the Earth’s very hot mantle and then up through the other
side, another 2,200 miles of rock, until finally... wait, wait, wait. You
know a lot of people think that if you dig a hole all the way through the
Earth, you will come up - your mother probably told you this - in
China. That’s what the American pioneer Isaac Swan thought. In 1825
he founded a town.
KIM BUNNER: The name of the town is Canton.
KRULWICH: Canton, lUinois.
BUNNER: Yes.
KRULWICH: And, says Kim Bunner, the town librarian, it is named
Canton because Mr. Swan thought that his patch of Illinois prairie was...
BUNNER: Straight across the Earth. If you dug a hole you would hit
17
Canton, China.
KRULWICH: And so he literally thought that.
BUNNER: Yes.
KRULWICH: And there’s another town close by, Pekin, Illinois, named
Pekin because it was supposed to be opposite Peking, or Beijing, at least
that’s what Pekin’s acting mayor Frank Mackaman heard.
MACKAMAN: I remember growing up with that same myth. I even
remembered digging a hole next to the foundation of my house in an
effort to reach China.
KRULWICH: But if Mayor Mackaman had a drill like mine and you
went from his house all the way through the Earth, he - like me and
almost every one of you listening to me - would discover that the other
side of the Earth from where we stand is not China but water. Open,
empty ocean. New York City, for example, is opposite an ocean. You’re
probably wondering about your town, Mr. Mayor.
MACKAMAN: Yes, I would be curious to know.
KRULWICH: You are opposite water too, as, by the way, are most peo­
ple because remember that the planet is mostly water. But as it turns out
though, in the Lower 48 U.S. states, there are only three places, just three
places, where you can stand on dry land on the other side of the Earth.
Just three.
MACKAMAN: How interesting!
KRULWICH: And they are: First a patch of land near Karval, Colorado
along Route 109. That patch is directly opposite an extinct volcano near
Antarctica.
MAN: Welcome to the 2006 graduation ceremonies here on the campus
of Otero Junior College.
KRULWICH: If you are on the Otero campus near La Junta, Colorado,
you are directly opposite a French island called lie Amsterdam, mostly
occupied by seals. There is a patch in Shelby, Montana opposite the
Kerguelen Islands, islands so remote that an encyclopedia says they
would be the best place on Earth to survive a nuclear war because you
are nowhere. However, if you’re not on the right patch of Route 109 in
Colorado, or Otero Junior College, or Shelby, Montana - if you’re any­
where else in the Lower 48, you might dig your hole, but you would
come up in water.
MACKAMAN: I think my excavating career is over.
KRULWICH: Don’t despair. For one thing, you should know that the
entire state of Hawaii is opposite land. Opposite Botswana. It’s not
18
China, but stiU I did ask myself, is there a place on Earth where if I dug a
hole, I would end up in China.
MACKAMAN: Working backward. Yeah. Did you find an answer to
that?
KRULWICH: I did.
MACKAMAN: And where would you end up?
KRULWICH: Well, Mr. Mayor, if you went through Concordia,
Argentina - tango country not far from Buenos Aires - and you dug
from Concordia straight through the Earth, you would end up in ...
Shanghai. So while you couldn’t do this anywhere in the U.S.A., there
are large swaths of Argentina and Chile where if your mother says to
you, go out in the yard and dig a hole to China, you know what, you
could. Robert Krulwich, NPR News, in New York.®
Now, let’s do the same story for TV. In fairness to the television
industry, they have shorter time spans, but here’s that story again. This is
a cartoon actually done by a fellow who calls himself Odd Todd.
CHARLES GIBSON: I really have no idea how to introduce
f III
the following story. I can say that everyone here at World
News just loved it. You see, our Robert Krulwich came in
wondering about one of the great “what if” questions that
every child asks.
KRULWICH: What American kid hasn’t thought about taking a shovel
and digging a hole so deep that it goes right through to China? Well, it
turns out that there’s a problem here. If you dig a hole almost anywhere
in the Lower 48 states of the U.S.A. straight through the Earth, you will
come up not in China but in an ocean. It turns out our 48 states lie
directly opposite a cold empty sea near Antarctica, so almost everybody
in America is standing opposite water with very few exceptions. We did
find that if you stand right here, 22 miles east of Kit Carson, Colorado,
or here, near Lamar, Colorado, both are directly opposite tiny volcanic
islands, lie Saint-Paul and lie Amsterdam. Or if you stand here, 20 miles
from the Canadian border, near Chester, Montana, literally the home of
the Bo and Joette Woods family, they live directly opposite the
Kerguelen Islands near Antarctica. And that’s pretty much it.
Everybody else in the 48 states who digs a hole straight through the
Earth will end up getting wet. Which does make you wonder, is there
^Weekend Edition, National Public Radio, June 17,2006.
19
 just feels different to her. When my mom watched TV she was like a big­
any place on the whole planet where if you dug a hole straight through,
oted person because she would watch the villains and they would always
all the way through, you would end up in China? If you take your child
be villains to her. If the good guys in her television show were doing
to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and drive about two hours north to the
something bad, she couldn’t see it or she would assign it to the villains.
Uruguayan border and give him a shovel and he starts digging here, he
She just couldn’t see what was being plainly set before her, and this is
should pop out in downtown Shanghai. Just so you know. Robert
interesting.
Krulwich on ABC News.
If I were to appear on television with my hair in my face - like this
GIBSON: A little value added to this broadcast. That is World News for
- you would be so stunned to see my hair like this that I could say to you:
this Thursday. I’m Charlie Gibson and I hope you had a good day.^
In a few hours, Knoxville will be hit by an atomic bomb. Everyone living
there better leave or . . . And about 20 percent of you, watching me on
So now let’s think about this. In the radio version there are obvi­
television, would say - what is wrong with that man’s hair? You wouldn’t
ously all kinds of layers and layers of things going on. You have some his­
have heard anything I said. The point about good grooming on television
tory about the prairie and early settlers. You have two fantasy voyages,
is not that it’s the nice thing to do, it’s what you have to do if you want any­
three stops on a US. map, all kinds of characters - in the radio version.
body to hear what you say.
The TV version was shorter, it was half the length, which is like a Chekhov
This also applies in race matters in a very, very big way - race and
versus Homer sort of situation, using a totally different landscape.
the cosmetics of a human. I once went on Nightline and wanted to do a
The visual strength of the TV is interesting. Having the Earth
segment on how women all over the world were having fewer babies.
turn and actually seeing the United States flipped from the northern
Wherever they were, there was a real change in the fertility rate, so I asked
hemisphere into the ocean is something radio just can’t do. There’s some­
the staff on Nightline, who were a variety of shades of humanity, to please
thing just very clear and transparent about that that is unmatchable on the
bring me their babies 18 months old or younger. We had this whole big
radio.
mess of babies on the floor. And there I was, narrating the piece, saying
On the other hand, the words on radio just matter more. On TV
So all the world’s babies . .. blah blah . . . All the world’s babies? Here’s
the images control, so your eyes see before your brain hears. For TV you
what happened. All the redheads watching, wherever they were, were
just have to write less. If you would try to do in a television story all that
thinking: Am I there? Is there a redheaded baby? They don’t hear any­
I did in the radio story, the audience would get exhausted; it’s just too
thing I’m saying. They are searching for a picture of themselves. Where
much.
are the redheads? The dark-skinned black people are saying. Okay, I see
I don’t know which piece gets into your head more deeply. I’ll bet
a dark one, but the light-skinned people are saying. Where’s the light­
if we had a show of hands, it would probably be the radio version. How
skinned? The Asians are looking for Asians. The blondes are looking for
many people just found the radio story more interesting than the televi­
blondes. Everybody is looking. Before they can hear anything, they have
sion one? And how many found the television story more interesting than
to make sure that they’re included in a story that says “All”
the radio one? That’s about even.
Now surprising things happened. This is a stunner to me. A long
I’m a real radio freak. It’s a constant struggle for me to make TV
time ago in the 1990s, ABC didn’t have the Olympics - NBC did - so we
as compelling as radio because there are very different kinds of music in
didn’t have anything to show. So I said to Peter Jennings, “I have an idea.
play.
Why don’t I do an Animal Olympics where I take track and field events
When composing a story, voice matters, cutting matters, pacing
and I put an insect up against the humans, because the way insects are
matters, the medium matters - whether you’re on radio or TV - but there
built, if you scale them up - which you really can’t do biologically, but if
are two other things that matter also. One is who is listening. You could
you could - they’d just whip up on the humans every time.”
have a friend watching a piece on television and she’ll just see something
I got really serious about this, so for the sprint, I called up insect
that you didn’t see because she hates somebody or likes somebody and it
people all over and I was told by a researcher at the University of Illinois,
^ABC World News, October 19, 2006.

21
20
“Well, we’ve got the wolf spider; it’s incredibly fast.” What’s a wolf spider?
A wolf spider is not a web-spinning spider. When it sees its food, it just
sprints and grabs it. It does an incredible sprint.
Then a University of California, Berkeley researcher said, “No, no,
no, no, the American cockroach utterly, utterly outruns the wolf spider.”
So we had a race off. But not on TV. I had the University of Illinois clock
the wolf spider. As you see, we put the cockroach on a track with hurdles.
I determined for a certainty that the American cockroach is faster than the
wolf spider, and therefore the fastest insect in the world. There was no
question about the fastest human being - that was Michael Johnson. He
had just won a sprint at the time. So I said, okay, let’s do the Animal
Olympics. Here’s what we did, and remember I’m thinking about cock­
roaches as champions here.
PETER JENNINGS: We’d like to get a jump on the Olympics,
if you’ll pardon the pun. The games will open to the usual
tremendous fanfare this weekend, but for our part, we’re going
to start early. All this week and nowhere else, you will see
some extraordinary talent you will not see in Atlanta. In fact,
ABC’s Robert Krulwich has taken the thrill of victory and the agony of
defeat to a whole new realm.
[Music]
KRULWICH: The Olympics is a time to show ourselves off, to see how
strong and how fast and how agile we can be. And we are good, but the
Lord made other creatures and some of them could beat the pants off us.
Michael Johnson of Texas is perhaps the world’s fastest human, but how
would he do in a fair contest against one of the fastest insects in the
world, the American cockroach? Here’s one running on a treadmill in
the Biology Department of the University of California at Berkeley.
According to Professor Robert Full, who runs this lab, if you scale up a
cockroach to the size of humans, it would move at a speed of about 220
miles an hour, a lot faster than Mr. Johnson. And here’s why. Let’s slow
Michael Johnson down and see how many steps he takes in one second.
We’ll go 1,2, 3, 4, 5. Now in the same second the cockroach takes 50
steps, 10 times more, a much more efficient running machine. Even
though at higher speeds, if you look very closely, you will notice that the
cockroach has lifted up and is running on just its two hind legs, so it’s
bipedal, just like us. Bottom line though, if you rerun the 200-meter
qualifying event where Johnson established his world record recently
22
and put in a cockroach adjusted for size, the cockroach goes so fast.
Ready, get set... Now the race would end in 2.7 seconds. That is
almost ten times faster than the human champion on the American con­
tinent. Well, at least he’s American.*
Now let me tell you what happened while we ran this story.
Thirty seconds into the piece, the telephones began ringing. The calls
were mostly from African-Americans saying How dareyou\ They thought
that this human being who happened to be an African-American human
being was being terribly insulted by this comparison with what they called
vermin. Every time an African-American does anything - gets ahead -
someone in the media slaps them down. Well, I just didn’t see this reac­
tion coming at all, and it kept coming and coming. There must have been
200 calls. They weren’t crazy people; they were quite thoughtful, smart
people. I felt horrible, and the selfish part of me wondered what Peter was
going to do, because he was taking the calls too and looking at me, and I
was thinking oh boy. See what happened? Most people can’t look at cock­
roach and think of it as a very talented animal. They look at a cockroach
as bug that defecates on their food and causes disease. They don’t think
of it as a morally neutral beast. To them it’s an insult to be compared to a
cockroach.
I thought ABC was probably going to cancel the whole Animal
Olympics series. Then Peter said to me, “Well, what do you have for
tomorrow?” I said, I have boxing. Not an insect this time. It's a crus­
tacean. I have a shrimp. In order to eat, a shrimp hits other shelled ani­
mals. They go POW! That’s what they do. This shrimp I got - it was like
the Muhammad Ali shrimp. We put it into the aquarium and it looked
around and it went POW! and broke the glass. All the water poured out
and the shrimp with it, and there was glass falling on the shrimp. Scaled
up, that shrimp’s punch had the power of a 16-inch gun on the battleship
U.S.S. New Jersey. If the shrimp were the same size as Teofilo Stevenson,
the Cuban Olympic champion in 1976 and 1980, the shrimp would just go
POW! and —
So Peter said, what race is he? I said he’s African-Cuban. He said,
hmm, do you have anybody else? I said, well, the strongest man in the
world is Chinese. He lifts six times his weight. I compare his strength to
that of a rhinoceros beetle. I got a Velcro dot and attached it to one of
those little weights that you apply to model railroad trains. It weighed, I
*ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, July 15,1996,
23
 If I say Brad Pitt, you think of a nice-looking man, but if I say
think, an ounce, and that was already 16 times the weight of the rhinoc­
RNA, most of you think of nothing. So, as a reporter, I have nothing to
eros beetle. I put four of these weights on the beetle while it was running
fall back on. I am talking with an audio vocabulary but a visual blank.
on a treadmill. When I got to 80 times the beetles body weight, he rolled
You know how hard that is? If I talk about hockey, at least you can visu­
over and his little legs were still going as he went right off the screen. Peter
alize somebody with a stick and a puck. If I talk about baseball, you see a
said, “Uh, let’s do that one.”
ball and a bat. If I talk about RNA, you see nothing, so I’m starting with
Then Peter did something very interesting. He said to me, “You
nothing. This is a story about something new hidden in living cells. This
know what? Tomorrow I’m going to really like your piece.” I said,
is a story involving turning genes on and off. What’s a gene? How do you
“What?” He said, “Yeah,” and walked away.
So the next night, I went home and turned on the TV. I was turn it on and off? Can you do all this in one setting? This is a case where
I tried the loose, easy narrative style alternating with precise pacing. I
thinking, what’s he going to do? My story ends and Peter’s face appears on
kept shifting so there are parts where you see traditional elements: there’s
the screen. He could have come on and just killed me, right? A little
a story of a lady who gets sick and has a doctor visit - a conventional news
snicker, a shrug, a whiff of contempt? But there’s his beneficent face, the
story. There’s a cartoon in here. There’s a story of a purple petunia.
one that means you’ve done well. Then, with a gigantic smile, he says,
There’s a detective story in here. Occasionally I use what I call “nature
“Thank you so much for your calls yesterday. Obviously you’re all fasci­
porn” to give viewers a break from the science. In the regular porn world,
nated with this relationship between...” - and I’m thinking oh boy - “and
you have a nice-looking woman and a nice-looking man and some heavy
because tomorrow we’ll have another Animal Olympics story and you’ll
breathing and everybody stops to look at that. In the natural world, you
really like this one,” he says. And his eyes are just beaming through the
take a beautiful whale, you take a swan, you get a pack of flamingoes - it
television set into you. I don’t how anchors do that, but when they do, it’s
leaves people limp. They go “ooooh” - and it’s absolutely useful in pacing.
like a hostess serving you her favorite meatloaf at dinner. You can’t not
You’ll see that. I just kept shifting the rhythm. I’m almost out of breath
like the meatloaf - it’s her meatloaf. I was his meatloaf, so he served me
throughout this piece.
and everybody liked me.
I don’t know whether this story actually works. When we were
But lurking in the background at all times is this deep fact about
finished, I said, you know what? This will play in high school biology
America - and you have to be careful. You have to take whatever story
classes, but it just will not work on television. But it is my most concert­
you are telling and put yourself in the shoes of just about everybody and
ed effort to teach something completely new from scratch through televi­
try to imagine who is going to scream. Not all screams are legitimate, but
sion, despite the fact that television is the medium most resistant to ideas
with this Animal Olympics series, they were too big, too broad, and too
that I have ever encountered. There is just something about television that
deep for me to ignore. You have to realize that this is a multiracial society
wants to be dumb. It likes fires, it likes explosions, it likes sex, it likes cry­
with people who come from all over the world and they are really sensi­
ing, it likes laughing, it likes crashing - it just doesn’t like a thought. It just
tive about plural pronouns like we and us, so if you’re going to say we and
isn’t built for that. This story is deep thought. So here it is. It’s called
us, include them - and comb your hair.
“RNAi” and it ran on Nova.’
I’m going to conclude with the hardest piece I think I’ve ever
done. It’s a little longer and it’s a different me because all of these other
KRULWICH: What if I told you that scientists recently made
stories are short and have to be kind of chipper and funny. I did them by
\^1 a discovery that is so surprising and so powerful? Not only
simply taking all the things that I’ve talked to you about and putting them
are we about to know much more about how all these diseases
all into one piece. But this next story is about as complex as you can do
work - Alzheimer’s and asthma and arthritis and cancer and
for radio or television. It’s a story about something called RNAi, a very
HIV and all the others - there’s a real chance that we can treat
complex bit of molecular biology. It’s a story about DNA. When most
many of these diseases much more effectively all because of this one dis-
people hear DNA, they think of that molecule with the little staircase in
between. But this isn’t really a story about DNA. It’s a story about RNA. *Nova Science Now, July 26,2005.

25
24
covery called RNAi, with a little “i” at the end, which I will explain later.
You don’t hear much about it, but RNAi is a really big deal, and
the curious thing about it is the discovery of RNAi was an accident. It was
a puzzle that appeared in a petunia. It was a purple petunia, but to fully
appreciate this tale, let’s back up a bit. Every creature - you know this
from high school - is made from a recipe that comes from its DNA spelled
out in chemical As and Cs and Ts and Gs inside the famous double helix.
Every creature has its own DNA - different for mice and for whales and
for flowers - but to go from a chemical recipe of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts to a
real creature that squeaks or soars through the air or turns gloriously pink,
that requires RNA. RNA is the thing that turns you from a chemical code
to a real, pulsing, living creature. RNA builds life. That’s big. So big that
to modern-day researchers like Greg Hannon, RNA is more important
than DNA.
GREGORY HANNON: DNA really works for RNA, and proteins really
work for RNA.
KRULWICH: Would you get an argument, by the way, from somebody
else?
HANNON: Oh undoubtedly. Sure.
KRULWICH: So how do you get from DNA to become a real creature?
Well, let’s take one of those fantastic voyages and we’ll show you. We’re
going to find DNA and we’ll make it a typical cell, so we’ll have to fly in
and then go off to the nucleus of the cell which will make a beautiful
castle headquarters, and there’s the DNA, the master code, inside the
nucleus. DNA, says Greg, never leaves the nucleus.
HANNON: You ever meet one of those mean librarians? You know, in
the...
KRULWICH: Yes.
HANNON: ... Special Reserve section?
KRULWICH: The ones that go, “Pow”
HANNON: Right, you can take the thing, you can copy it, but you can’t
take the book, ‘cause somebody else might need it.
KRULWICH: So if DNA is locked in the nucleus, how do we get the
information out to build our creature? Well, that’s what RNA does. That
scribe copying recipes out of the cookbook and throwing them out the
window, out to the cytoplasm sea that makes up most of the cell, all
those recipes floating through the air? They are RNA. And to finish up,
in that sea, you see hundred of thousands of, well, we’ve made them into
little guys with chef hats.
26
HANNON: Those would be ribosomes. And in your world, they’re
chefs who are using the recipes that are written in the RNA.
KRULWICH: And whenever a recipe lands on a chef, whatever it is, he
cooks it?
HANNON: Whatever it is, he cooks it.
KRULWICH: And each recipe is for a protein. Proteins build cells:
Bone cells, brain cells, all cells. So, all these chefs are basically building
you. You are made of proteins. And because of RNA, we can copy, we
can distribute, and we can cook up you and me. And RNA has been
doing this for more than three billion years. But there was something
spectacular about RNA that nobody knew till just a few years ago and
they learned about it, as we told you, by accident.
RICHARD JORGENSEN: Here’s a good one. Maybe this ...
KRULWICH: In 1986, geneticist Rich Jorgensen was working at a
biotech startup company in California. He was asked to create a spec­
tacularly dazzling flower ...
JORGENSEN: That looks good.
KRULWICH: ... to attract investors.
JORGENSEN: So that we could convince venture capitalists, investors,
to give up more of the green stuff, more money.
KRULWICH: Still, back in 1986, geneticists didn’t know how to work
that easily with, say, roses. And so ...
JORGENSEN: We began with a simple plant: regular, garden-variety
petunias - petunias being a plant that were easy to introduce genes into
in 1986.
KRULWICH: And so they decided to create a very, very, very purple
petunia. Rich knew which gene produced purple. He knew how to
sneak an extra copy of that gene into the plant’s DNA - the master text
to be copied by that monk-like scribe.
JORGENSEN: It will be transcribed by the monk the same as any other
gene. He’ll throw the transcript out the window, into the cytoplasm,
where the chef will be able to pick it up and use it.
KRULWICH: Rich thought that if he added more purple recipes, he’d
get a purpler petunia. So he did it, and he waited. And what happened?
JORGENSEN: We produced, instead, white flowers.
KRULWICH: White flowers?
JORGENSEN: The complete opposite of what we had expected - com­
pletely white flowers. We lost pigmentation completely. Our initial
reaction was that something must have been wrong with the gene that
27
 KRULWICH: The Cop destroys not only the oddly shaped version.
we had engineered and introduced into the plant.
Whenever he sees that recipe - oddly shaped, regular shaped - that
KRULWICH: A mistake?
recipe in any form must be destroyed to defeat the virus. And the inter­
JORGENSEN: A mistake. So we checked everything out, and there
esting thing is, until 1998, nobody knew that cells had this defense
were no mistakes that we could find.
mechanism.
KRULWICH: So why didn’t the petunias turn purple? What happened?
LANDER: We had no idea it was there. That’s what’s so amazing. This
ERIC LANDER: The petunia was a big puzzle. Nobody understood
whole mechanism had been sitting there, where cells were able to tell
why when you add an extra gene for purple, you should not get more
that something was very funny when they saw mirror image messages
purple, but less purple. It took a decade of brilliant scientists working on
and start not just destroying the messages, but destroying anything that
petunias and fruit flies and worms and other organisms to finally work
looked like that message. They’d worked out this whole defense system
out what was going on.
against viral RNA, and we then accidentally stumbled into using it.
KRULWICH: And what was going on is, quite by accident. Rich had
KRULWICH: The accident was Rich Jorgensen’s purple petunia. The
discovered a secret inside living cells. Cells, from time immemorial,
question, remember, was when Rich tried to make his petunia more pur­
have had a mortal enemy called the virus. So let’s imagine that the virus
ple, why did it turn white? Well the answer, it turns out, was that Rich,
is a pirate ship. It lands; it then sends the invaders inside the cell to
by accident, discovered the Cop. When Rich invaded the petunia cell
shower recipes down to those cooks. But some of those recipes, you’ll
and inserted his make-more-purple instructions, he didn’t know it, but
notice, look a little different. And what’s in these recipes is not good for
his purple instructions happened to have that suspicious viral shape. So
the cell.
when the Cop saw the recipe, the Cop thought “Virus!” and destroyed
HANNON: No, it’s decidedly not good for the cell, because the sole
every recipe for purple in the cell.
purpose of that virus is to make additional copies of itself, to the point
JORGENSEN: So there’s no possibility anymore of producing the pur­
that the entire cell is filled up with this. And the cell explodes, releasing
ple pigment, because the purple transcripts are gone.
these viruses to go and infect whatever other cells they can find.
KRULWICH: If there are no recipes for purple, the chefs don’t cook
KRULWICH: So the theory is that long ago, cells developed a secret
purple.
defense system, which we will call “the Cop.” What the Cop does is,
JORGENSEN: And because there’s no purple pigment produced, the
when viruses invade and create a shower of murderous recipes, the Cop
flowers will be white.
looks and thinks, “Hmm, some of these have a very fishy shape.” It’s a
KRULWICH: And that’s how Rich and petunias helped discover what
chemical difference, which comes down to some of the viral recipes are
we now call RNAi.
two pages instead of one, and one side is a mirror image of the other.
LANDER: RNAi means RNA interference, because the Cop is interfer­
But the point is, to the Cops, there’s something not right about this
ing with RNA messages, with the recipes in the cell.
shape. So when they see it in that shape?
KRULWICH: And when scientists realized that every plant and animal
LANDER: They say, “Virus!” They say...
cell has RNAi - a way to turn off the recipes, turn off genes - they
KRULWICH: Uh oh.
thought, “Hmm, maybe we can use these Cops to work for us.”
LANDER: ... “Uh oh.”
MARTY RUSSELL: Okay, Trevor?
KRULWICH: And the Cop destroys the recipe. Now when you say it
KRULWICH: Which brings us to Marty. Seventy-eight years old, she
“destroys,” should we think like a kung fu kind of thing? Is it like a
and her husband used to spend lots of time here, at their daughter’s
“Hyeh!” sort of deal?
nursery.
LANDER: Yeah, a little enzymatically, a little thermodynamics. Things
M. RUSSELL: Thank you, Rosie.
like that.
KRULWICH: Years ago, she enjoyed doing lots of things.
KRULWICH: Enzymatically?
TREVOR RUSSELL: Her passion was reading.
LANDER: Enzymatic kung fu maybe, yeah.

29
28
M. RUSSELL: Was, uh ...
T. RUSSELL: She would read everything...
M. RUSSELL: Golf.
T. RUSSELL: Yeah.
M. RUSSELL: I loved to play golf, bridge.
KRULWICH: But then Marty began losing her sight.
M. RUSSELL: Couldn’t see. And I’d probably get the peppers in with
the zucchinis, and there’ll be big problems then.
KRULWICH: So she went to her doctor, who told her ...
M. RUSSELL: “You have macular degeneration.”
KRULWICH: A degenerative disease caused by too many blood vessels
growing in the eye underneath the retina.
PETER KAISER, M.D. (Cleveland Clinic Cole Eye Institute): As these
blood vessels grow, they leak out fluid and blood in the center of her
vision, and it’s as if you’re looking through a very dirty windshield,
essentially.
M. RUSSELL: I went home. I was just devastated.
KRULWICH: So Marty volunteered to be a candidate for RNAi therapy,
something so new, she’s kind of a pioneer.
KAISER: She was probably one of the first to get it for any disease
whatsoever, specifically for macular degeneration. Hey. How are you?
M. RUSSELL: Hello, Dr. Kaiser. How are you?
KAISER: Good to see you. This is the VIP room.
M. RUSSELL: I feel very honored.
KRULWICH: The reason Marty has so many blood vessels growing in
her eye, clouding her vision, is there’s probably a mistake in her DNA, in
a gene that produces too many recipes that say, “Make more blood ves­
sels.” So the chefs cook up proteins for more, and she ends up with too
many blood vessels. Her doctor wants her to have fewer blood vessels,
but how do you get the chefs to make fewer blood vessels?
LANDER: It was pretty easy. You want to shut down a gene? Put in a
copy of the gene with its mirror image. That signals the cell, “Better shut
this thing down.”
KAISER: We inserted a needle after numbing her up.
KRULWICH: So the doctors put - literally injected - RNA recipes into
Marty’s eyes that said, “Make more blood vessels.” But they made those
recipes look dangerous, like viral recipes, hoping the Cop in Marty’s cells
would leap to it and destroy lots of recipes for more blood vessels, leav­
ing Marty with fever blood vessels. They wanted the Cop to turn off
30
Marty’s disease. Did it work?
KAISER: Marty’s vision has improved. It’s a very promising result.
M. RUSSELL: I can play bridge now.
KAISER: Which is very important.
M. RUSSELL: I’m not great, but it’s part of my life.
KRULWICH: She can see flowers again.
M. RUSSELL: Oh, some of them are just gorgeous.
KRULWICH: So, apparently, they did trick the Cop in Marty’s cells to
reduce vein production, although not completely.
M. RUSSELL: I see the yellow. The inside is just a little cloudy, but I
can see it.
KAISER: There’re a lot of questions still that need to be answered. This
is not a treatment that is proven.
M. RUSSELL: Lovely.
KRULWICH: Does the treatment last?
M. RUSSELL: That’s beautiful.
KRULWICH: All these are big questions. Still, in mice, RNAi has been
effective with Huntington’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, hepatitis, breast
cancer. So, says Greg, if we ever work this out in humans ...
HANNON: Any sort of disease that you can imagine becomes fair
game.
KRULWICH: All the diseases which would be helped if you shut off a
gene...
HANNON: Cancer, HIV, for example ...
KRULWICH: Wait a minute. Is this because you’re just an RNA buff
that you’re saying ... you’ve just listed cancer and HIV. These are
famous, big, fat diseases.
HANNON: ... arthritis ...
KRULWICH: Well, stop listing them and tell me, is this a prejudice that
you’re telling me or is this true? I mean, these are all candidates for this
kind of therapy?
HANNON: Certainly they are.
KRULWICH: And finally, we have saved the best for last. The true
power of RNAi goes even deeper than finding cures to terrible diseases.
Because what RNAi does ... remember, the Cop’s job is to turn off
information, turn off genes.
LANDER: The big problem of understanding, say, the human genome
is you have 20,000 genes. How in the world are you supposed to know
what each one does? Well, one very good way to start would be to turn
31
off gene number one and see what went wrong.
KRULWICH; So you could go through all the genes that make up a
human or, for that matter, make up a petunia, and turn off each gene
one at a time. If you trick the Cop to turn off gene number one, no
color. So gene number one is involved in color production. Try gene
number two, no petals - gene number two, involved with petals. And so
on.
HANNON: You could make too many leaves; they could curl up; they
could be upside down. Almost anything could happen.
KRULWICH: But getting rid of the gene tells you what the gene does
when it’s working?
HANNON: That’s right.
LANDER: The RNAi discovery is just amazing. Ten years ago, when
we were sitting around talking about what we would really need to
understand the human genome, we all said we would need some magic
way that you could turn off any gene at will, just based on knowing its
sequence. And what’s happened is this discovery by scientists about
RNAi has given us exactly that. It turns out that nature already had a
way to turn off any gene at will.
KRULWICH: And now, with RNAi as their key, scientists will have the
means to decode every living thing, to identify the genes that allow us to
grow, that allow us to move, that give us beauty and color. RNA is a
modest little molecule, but what it gives us is the world.
Advisory Committee for the Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures
Dorothy Bowles Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media
James A. Crook Professor & Director Emeritus, School of Journalism &
Electronic Media
George Everett Professor Emeritus of Journalism
Peter Gross Professor & Director, School of Journalism & Electronic Media
Russel Hirst Associate Professor of English;
Director, Technical Communication Program
Kelly Leiter Meeman Professor Emeritus of Journalism;
Dean Emeritus of the College of Communications
Mark Littmann Professor, Julia G. & Alfred G. Hill Chair of Excellence
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing
Dwight Teeter Professor of Journalism & Electronic Media;
former Dean of the College of Communications
Joseph Trahern, Jr. Alumni Distinguished Professor of English
John Noble Wilford Science Correspondent and Senior Writer, The New York Times
Michael Wirth Professor & Dean, College of Communication & Information

So, that’s the question. The RNAi story is a really big bit of sci­
ence. It goes on and on and on. I still haven’t figured out whether this
video is just for people at universities who study science or whether nor­
mal people would sit through it. It’s about as far as I’ve ever gone. As you
see, it involves all the things I’ve said, voice, changing rhythms, and all
that. Did it work? I don’t know. Was it too much? I don’t know. But in
this business you keep trying. You go up to the very edge of what you can
do and then you do a little more and you see what happens. That’s the way
I’ve done my job and the way I’ve run my career.

32 33
 special Thanks

The School of Journalism & Electronic Media I

is deeply grateful to: |

Society ofProfessional Journalists, East Tennessee Chapter |

for additional support of the Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures |

Society for Technical Communication, East Tennessee Chapter

for additional support of the Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures
Previous Alfred & Julia Hill Lectures are available in booklet form. For a copy,
contact the School of Journalism & Electronic Media, University of Tennessee.

1989 John Noble Wilford Science as Exploration

1991 Dorothy Nelkin Risk Communication and the Mass Media
1993 Gina Kolata Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies
1994 Victor Cohn Reporting—Good and Bad—on Health in
America
1996 Jim Detjen Environmental News: Where Is It Going?
1997 Jon Franklin The End of Science Writing
1999 Robert Kanigel The Perils of Popularizing Science
2000 John Noble Wilford Science Journalism Across Two Centuries
2001 Sharon Begley Why Science Journalism Isn’t Science
2002 David Quammen Midnight in the Garden of Fact and Factoid
2003 John Rennie Naysaying the Nincompoops:
On Being a Maven in a Misinformed Era
2004 Paula Apsell What’s Hot, What’s Not in Science Programming
2005 Jonathan Weiner On the Writing o/His Brother’s Keeper:
A Story from the Edge of Medicine

2006 Michael D. Lemonick Crank or Genius - How Does a Science Writer

Tell the Difference?
2007 Robert Krulwich What a Reporter Learns from Dylan, Coltrane,
and Chumbawamba: Journalism as Music
tobUNIVERSITYo/TENNESSEE ur
 Chimps with Spears:
Talking about Science in a Tabloid Culture

Alan Boyle
Sixteenth
Alfred & Julia Hill Lecture
on Science, Society, and the Mass Media
March 25,2008

School of Journalism and Electronic Media

College of Communication and Information
TOEUNIVERSITYQfTENNESSEEiwr
The Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture series on science, society, and the mass media
was established in 1989 by Tom Hill, former publisher of The Oak Ridger, and Mary
Frances Hill Holton in honor and memory of their parents.

Alfred and Julia Hill founded The Oak Ridger in 1949, seven years after the govern­
ment established Oak Ridge to house workers on the atomic bomb project. The Oak
Ridger was the first successful privately owned newspaper in the city and marked an
important stage in the transition of Oak Ridge from federal operation to private
ownership and self-government.

Published by
School of Journalism & Electronic Media
College of Communication 8c Information
University of Tennessee

Serial Editor: Mark Littmann

Julia G. & Alfred G. Hill Professor
of Science, Technology, and Medical Writing

Serial Designer: Eric L. Smith

Lecturer, Journalism & Electronic Media
and Assistant Director, Student Publications
Britney Spears vs.
Serial Design Consultant: Robert Heller Chimps with Spears:
Associate Professor, Journalism & Electronic Media
Talking about Science in a Tabloid Culture

Alan Boyle
Britney Spears vs. Chimps with Spears:
Talking about Science in a Tabloid Culture
© 2008 Alan Boyle

Publication Authorization Number ROl-2910-057-002-09

 Alan Boyle
Alan Boyle is the Science Editor for MSNBC.com,
responsible for the content and presentation of the
Science and Space sections of MSNBC on the
Internet. He also contributes to the News,
Opinion, Technology, and Health sections. In his
Cosmic Log on MSNBC.com, he writes about
physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, paleontol­
ogy, archaeology, and other -ologies that strike his Britney Spears vs. Chimps with Spears:
fancy. He also brings science stories to the
MSNBC cable channel.
Talking about Science
in a Tabloid Culture
Boyle was born in Cascade, Iowa, and graduated from Loras College in
Dubuque maxima cum laude with majors in English, Writing, and Philosophy.
He earned his master's degree in journalism at Columbia University. He began
his journalism career at the Cincinnati Post, then spent six years at the
by Alan Boyle
Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, and twelve years at the Seattle Post-
Intelligencer. Through the course of his newspaper career, he wrote and edited
general news, lifestyle and entertainment news, and international news.
For students of bizarre primate behavior, February 22, 2007, was
a red-letter day. The day started out with big news from the savannahs
He joined MSNBC on the Internet at its launch in 1996, first as a writer/editor,
of Senegal, where researchers reported spotting chimpanzees using
then as a reporter focusing on the online milieu. After covering the aftermath
of a catastrophic collision on the Mir space station and the sensational Mars
spearlike weapons to hunt and kill another type of primate known as
Pathfinder landing in 1997, he was put full-time on the space beat - which led lesser bushbabies.*
him to draw upon his longstanding interest in science and space as well as his
graduate-school classes in science writing. Over time, his portfolio came to It was the first time scientists had seen one primate species fash­
include coverage of science as well as space stories. ioning the tools of warfare to snuff out other primates. That is, if you
don’t count humans.
For his pioneering work in science journalism on the Internet, Boyle has won
many honors, among them: Later in the day, there was another news flash from the frontiers
of primatology: From the wilds of Malibu came word that... Britney
• American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Spears was back in rehab.^
Journalism Award (2002)
• National Association of Science Writers' Science in Society Award (2002) It wasn’t the first time a celebrity’s bizarre behavior made head­
• Society of Professional Journalists, Western Washington Chapter's lines, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. But it did provide further evi­
Almquist Award for Distinguished Service to Journalism (2007) dence for the hypothesis that even the attributes highly prized in a com­
munity - such as wealth, social status, and physical attractiveness - are
Boyle lives in Bellevue, Washington, with his wife, Tonia; his daughter, Natalie,
a budding entomologist; and his son, Evan, a math maven. ' http://www.msnbc.msn.eom/id/l 7281240/
^ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17260263

3
no guarantee of a stable existence. That’s something even chimps can one I work for, are particularly good at developing data to see what peo­
relate to. ple really look at rather than what we think they should look at. And if
we were to target our journalism based on the raw statistics alone, we’d
So how did those two revelations stack up in the news coverage be putting a lot more resources into serving up celebrity photos, gossip,
of the day? In an earlier age, the story about chimps with spears might and sensational crime stories.
have found its way into the next day’s New York Times, while the story
about Britney Spears might have been relegated to the tabloids and Here’s how the problem was put recently by Chicago Tribune
Hollywood magazines. Company owner Sam Zell, who’s a big fan of celebrity news and cute
puppies: “It seems like an awful lot of journalism that’s being written is
Nowadays, it’s exactly the opposite: The rehab story was all over not being read.”
the media, as any story about Britney Spears usually is. (In the Times,
the item amounted to a couple of sentences in a briefs column.) The How this ajfects talking about science
“chimps with spears” story, however, didn’t pop up in the Times until
almost two months later, as part of a larger feature about chimp behav­ The challenge is especially acute for science
ior. journalism: To cite just one statistic, the number of
weekly science sections appearing in U.S. newspapers
When it That’s the way it reached a peak of 95 in 1989 but fell to just 34 sections
comes to our own as of 2005, based on an analysis of reports from the
Web site at usually turns out Scientists’ Institute for Public Information as well as
MSNBC.com, that nowadays, not only for Britney, Editor & Publisher.
single story about
Spears in Malibu but for Lindsay Lohan, Anna In print media, science writers are becoming somewhat of an
attracted almost endangered species, based on anecdotal information. That’s especially
four times as many
Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, ■ ■
the case if you regard science news as distinct from so-called “news you
page views as the and other exotic primates.# # can use” features on health and fitness.
story about the
spears in Senegal. Both stories did respectably well, but in terms of expo­ Unfortunately, science coverage is often looked upon as news
sure as well as traffic, Britney stomped all over the chimps. you can’t use - which puts it on a level with the daily Britney Spears
update.
That’s the way it usually turns out nowadays, not only for
Britney, but for Lindsay Lohan, Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and To some extent, we science writers are doing it to ourselves by
other exotic primates. Over the past 10 years, the rise of the Internet, 24- defining what we do as having no relation to what we eat, what we wear,
hour news channels, and celebrity magazines have put the spotlight on how we live, or who we watch.
the tabloid side of the news universe - and have left the less glossy cor­
ners of that universe behind in the shadows. That kind of perceived irrelevance puts the whole enterprise of
expert reporting about scientific issues in peril. In fact, it contributes to
This is a cause for concern among journalists - at least for jour­ the tabloidization of the media marketplace by leading media managers
nalists who see their profession as the pursuit of public good rather than to decide that coverage of scientific issues isn’t important to their cus­
the pursuit of public bad behavior. Online media companies, such as the tomers - and therefore do not help with the bottom line.

4 5
 The peril is particularly acute in a media marketplace that inun­ National Enquirer. I would see the story as more of a conversation
dates the customers with information they have to pick and choose starter about the mash-up of scriptural scholarship and ethnobotany,
from. It’s entirely possible to fill your media diet with Britney Spears rather than a solid case of biblical archaeology.^
and cut out the chimps with spears entirely.
Yet another angle involves focus on the personalities behind
If we want to write about those chimps, and tell the world about the science. Let’s face it: A lot of the people who read about the foibles of
it, we have to fashion our own weapons to capture the public’s attention Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton have rarely if ever
- just like the tabloids do. listened to their CDs or bought a ticket to their movies or watched their
TV shows. Similarly, you don’t need to know how the shotgun method
How to use tabloid tactics of gene-sequencing works to appreciate the tale of J. Craig Venter, a guy
who not only decoded the human genome but also killed a sea snake with
So how do you talk about science in a tabloid his bare hands during the Vietnam War.
culture?
The scien­
One strategy would be to capitalize blatantly tific world has had I have to admit that the
on that culture. For example, the closest I’ve ever its share of fascinat­
come to learning about vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers is when ing celebrities and headline - “Was Moses
I’ve visited a Web site called "Britney Spears’ Guide to Semiconductor bad behavior, rang­
Physics.”^ Despite what the site claims, Britney is no expert on the sub­
High on Mount Sinai” - would
ing from physicist
ject, and the pictures are totally gratuitous. But if the tabloid angle gets Stephen Hawking’s have fit right in with the biblical-
even one more person to plow through the dense calculus behind laser victory over dis­
physics ... well, maybe the exercise is worth it.
era version of the
ability, to biologist
Woo-Suk Hwang’s National Enquirer
Another angle would be to mash up the kind of speculation we stem-cell scandal,
see in the tabloids with the celebrities of history. Some science stories to geneticist James
lend themselves naturally to this treatment. The CAT scan on King Watson’s controversy over race remarks.
Tutankhamen’s mummy, for example, was a story that deserved to be
ripped from the headlines and turned into a Law and Order episode: To my mind, Columbia’s Brian Greene and Harvard’s Lisa
“Who Killed King Tut?” (Actually, the scan indicated that a leg injury Randall exude the same kind of sex appeal for the scientific set that
was the likeliest cause of death.)^ Britney Spears once did for music fans.*

More recently, we had a story about hallucinogenic plants in the
Sinai desert, and whether Moses and other ancient Israelites may have
consumed such plants. This story was based on very thin evidence - an
article that was written by an Israeli psychologist for a new philosophical
journal. I have to admit that the headline - “Was Moses High on Mount
Sinai” - would have fit right in with the biblical-era version of the
http://britneyspears.ac/Iasers.htm
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7128729/
But you do have to be careful about the sex-appeal angle: After
interviewing Lisa Randall for Science Friday, NPR radio host Ira Flatow
came in for a ribbing because it sounded as if he was flirting with Lisa
on the air. And after interviewing Brian Greene for an MSNBC.com
Q8fA, I received an e-mail from a fellow science writer chiding me for
* http;//www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23468364/
* http://www.drury.edu/uc/archives/greene.jpg
http://www.aaptg.org/Events/SM2006/images/Randall(web).jp

6
7
saying that Brian was married and therefore “taken.” (She had a point,
and I toned down the reference.)^
If only scientists were always as fascinating as the celebrities
described in one of my favorite fake stories from The Onion, which is
headlined “Stephen Jay Gould Speaks Out Against Science Paparazzi.”
In the article, Gould and other science superstars are quoted as railing
against the photographers who constantly hound them as they frequent
hotspots like the Mayo Clinic, MIT, Princeton, and the Center for
Astrophysical Research in Antarctica.** , has implications for new disease treatments - for example, creating
I particularly like the article’s closing made-up quote from a die­
hard science fan: “These scientists are the most important people in
America," she’s quoted as saying. "Our very future depends on them.
They are enabling us to live longer and better, discovering the history of
the planet we live on, and unraveling the mysteries of the universe.
There's no way we'd ever let them work in obscurity. It's laughable.”
These examples of tabloid science may seem laughable as well,
but there’s a germ of truth behind all of them. Playing off the personali­
ties, cultural icons, cheap thrills, and pop culture references evoked by
scientific research can all whet the popular appetite for science news.
However, these angles don’t get to the key values of math and
science, medicine and engineering - the very real values brought up in
The Onion’s fake article: to understand how our universe works, to take
advantage of those workings, and to make our lives better.
The fact that science stories can also give you a sense of fiin and
adventure is a plus. And there’s at least one other payoff you can’t get
after reading another Britney Spears story: You come away feeling
smarter.
Going beyond the tabloids
Doing all that is a challenge. Take one of our
most popular science stories so far this year: Researchers
^ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17738478/
* http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28269
8 9
in Korea succeeded in developing a line of cloned cats that carried a
marker gene capable of producing a red fluorescent protein. The “glow
in the dark” angle was worthy of tabloid treatment - and that sparked
most of the more than 1,200 comments we published on that story.
However, a lot of our users missed the reason why those kitties
glowed in the dark (or at least under ultraviolet light). As I pointed out
in the original story, the fluorescent protein was merely a signal showing
that genetic information could be transferred into a cloned animal. That
replacement tissue with the genetic defects corrected. It also could lead
to new types of transgenic breeds of animals - for example, goats capable
of producing spider silk in their milk.
The glow-in-the-dark angle is the tabloid hook, but if you look
deeper into the story, it’s about much more than cute kitties.
That’s the secret weapon that can keep those of us who are inter­
ested in science for our own sake from becoming lesser bushbabies in
the fight for media survival. The results of research and development
touch every sphere of life and imagination: medicine and medical ethics
... environmental problems and environmental solutions ... engineer­
ing breakdowns and engineering’s grandest feats ... the perils and
promise of exploration on this planet and beyond . .. our deepest fears
and our highest hopes for the future.
Some of these topics take in much more than science journalism
in the classical sense. For example, take the issue of climate change:
How much of an impact is industrial activity having on the atmosphere
and the weather, and what can we do about it?
The answers will obviously have an impact on science and tech­
nology, but they will also affect tax policy, economics, politics, diploma­
cy, lifestyle, and even entertainment - as anyone who watched the “Live
8” concerts or saw A1 Gore’s Oscar-winning film can attest. Religious
groups ranging from the Vatican to the Southern Baptist Convention
have underscored the view that preserving the environment is a religious
obligation.
 Medical research is another field that raises a host of social
implications. The pace of innovation in biomedicine is increasing at a
rate that’s hard to keep up with: Several recent experiments have raised
hopes that normal skin cells could be reprogrammed into super-cells
that can become virtually any tissue in the body. How will that affect the
debate over stem cells and cloning? Once again, the answers will impact
politics and ethics as well as economics and lifestyle.
There are ample scientific angles to other fields as well, as I’ve
found out during my 12 years working at MSNBC. For the sports sec­
tion, I’ve written about how such things as sharkskin swimsuits, ski
undercoatings, wind tunnel tests, and even sleep-cycle adjustments have
affected Olympic performance. For the business section. I’ve written
about how mathematical models are being used to predict how markets
will fare - with varying degrees of accuracy.
I’ve also written about the science of predictive markets as it’s
applied to political polling, about how the phases of the Moon may have
affected the start of the war in Iraq five years ago, and even about how
phone-dialing patterns are being used to predict who’s going to be tossed
from American Idol. Now, there’s a tabloid story for you.
^ ^ r .\ A Then there are
£ £ Phases of the Moon may the tmiy deep ques-
■ 11 have affected the ■ ■ tions that don’t have
_ , . , ■■ tI to do with everyday
Start of the war in Iraq. # # life, but offer the ulti­
mate in tabloid
appeal: Where did the universe, stars, planets, and life come from? What
is our place in the cosmos and in the animal kingdom? Are we alone?
What will ultimately happen to our species, our planet, our universe?
These big questions open the door to a host of scientific stories - includ­
ing the story about chimps with spears.
The people who tell these stories don’t have to be science jour­
nalists per se. They may be coming to these subjects from the business
desk or the health beat or they may write primarily about education or
politics or religion or they may be general-assignment reporters. But as
time goes on and society becomes more dependent on technological
10
innovations, I do think that journalists in general will have to have a bet­
ter grounding in how the scientific method works, and what the limits of
that method are. They’ll have to know how to talk about these topics
accurately while making them accessible to the general public.
For example, over the past few years, there have been quite a lot
of claims and counterclaims about global warming. Cutting through all
the back-and-forth and getting at the truth will be an important task -
and that role could be taken on by science reporters, business reporters,
political reporters, or even well-spoken scientists and knowledgeable
amateurs. The same goes for other topics that go deeper than the
tabloids.
This kind of discourse is too important to be left confined to a
one-way communication medium, whether we’re talking about the
tabloids or The New York Times. And so I want to turn to the role that
multi-channel media - such as the online outfit that I work for - can
play in raising the level of discourse.
Conversations about science
Talking about science is challenging nowadays -
and not only because of the heavy competition in the
media marketplace. The people who participate in the
conversation over scientific issues should be ... well...
conversant with the foundations of science.
Statistics kept up by the National Science Foundation indicate
that, on average, Americans have just so-so knowledge about the scien­
tific basics. They’re particularly in the dark about emerging fields such
as nanotechnology, genetically modified organisms, and stem cell
research.
Evolutionary biology is one of the best examples showing how
there’s not always common ground on the scientific fundamentals. In
our own unscientific survey of MSNBC users, almost a quarter of the
people who clicked on the survey said they didn’t accept any evidence
that humans arose through evolution. And in more rigorous polls, more
than half of the respondents said they didn’t accept evolutionary theory.
11
 Meanwhile, other surveys have indicated that about a third of all
Americans think Earth is being visited by extraterrestrial beings, more
than a quarter believe astrology really works, and more than half say
some people have psychic powers.
The public discourse on scientific issues will have to take these
attitudes into account, adding a dimension that doesn’t usually enter into
the water-cooler discussion over whether Britney Spears is a bad mother.
The image that the wider public has of scientists and
their research often suffers from multiple misconceptions. On one hand,
many people think that
scientists should have
everything figured out
About a third of all
already. It’s hard to get Americans think Earth
people excited about
looking for the traces is being visited by
of organic chemicals extraterrestrial beings.
on Mars when they
think the aliens are
already here. On the other hand, people don’t always deal well
with the fact that scientific conclusions are provisional, based on the evi­
dence at hand and subject to change if new evidence comes in. A scien­
tist’s claim can be written off as “just a theory” and no more deserving
of credence than anyone else’s opinion.
In a one-way conversation, the general reader may end up con­
fused enough to skip the story about chimps with spears - or some
other, weightier matter - and go on to read the latest about Britney.
The good news is that most Americans really do believe that sci­
ence and technology are important for the future, and that in general the
benefits of research outweigh the risks. That shows up clearly and con­
sistently in surveys that the National Science Foundation has conducted
for 15 years. But there’s controversy as well: Most of those surveyed
worry that scientists don’t pay enough attention to society’s moral values.
I’m giving you just a quick snapshot of public attitudes toward
scientific and technological issues here. The point of all this is that there
12
are important needs going unmet in the public discourse over science -
ranging from having good sources of information to having a place to
exchange views about issues that are deeper than Britney Spears’ trou­
bles.
The place to talk about science:
cyberspace
The Internet is playing an important role in
responding to the public’s hunger for discourse over
science, and bridging the knowledge gap. Cyberspace
is the one place where there is cause for optimism.
The National Science Foundation’s surveys indicate that Internet media
outlets are currently the public’s No. 2 source for science news, just
behind television.
A 2006 survey conducted by the Pew Internet 8f American Life
Project came up with similar results, plus lots more. That survey found
that 87 percent of online users have employed the Internet as a research
tool - ranging from merely looking up a scientific term to downloading
scientific data. And when the Pew pollsters looked at usage patterns
among broadband Internet users who were younger than 30, the Internet
was the No. 1 source, beating television 44 percent to 32 percent.
For the next generation, the Internet may well be where it’s at
when it comes to finding out about science. There are several factors
that make cyberspace a good place to talk about science - and show off
scientific wonders as well.
The first factor is the Internet’s academic legacy. Once the
World Wide Web took off in the early 1990s, it would have been ridicu­
lous to try to do science without Internet access. For many years, scien­
tists have traveled a well-worn information superhighway using online
resources ranging from e-mail to Internet2’s massive data streams. That
has made the Internet into the sharpened spear of choice when it comes
to capturing the attention of the scientific community.
The second factor springs from the first: I’m talking about the
easy availability of scientific source material, ranging from unfiltered
13
papers to imagery of the cosmos and the microcosm. These are fantastic
resources for science journalists as well as scientists and news con­
sumers. Who needs science paparazzi when the riches of research are
just a click away? By linking to these resources, or adapting them for
our own reports, we can add extra depth and dimension to almost any
science story.
The past few years have brought yet another dimension to sci­
ence reporting on the Web: Scientists themselves are using Web sites,
blogs, and discussion forums to interact directly with the interested pub­
lic. Twenty years ago, there were precious few scientists who made an
impact through the media: astronomer Carl Sagan, for instance. Today,
countless scientists use the Web to explain their work, debate the trends
in their field, and even critique how their discoveries are presented in
the media. A short list might include astronomer Phil Plait at Bad
Astronomy, cosmologist Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, biologist P. Z.
Myers at Pharyngula, and the folks behind Real Climate and Talk
Origins.
Of course, it’s just as easy to spread scientific poppycock over the
Internet. Consider this headline^:
Asteroid plummets toward Britney Spears concert —
NABA launches rocket in attempt to speed it up
And that means the day-to-day role of journalists is, if anything,
more important online than it is offline. It’s up to us to help the public
separate the pearls from the poppycock. Of course, that also means we
journalists will occasionally come in for a whuppin - but that’s OK. If
you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the autoclave.
That brings me to what I see as the biggest factor in favor of
online science journalism: the ability to engage the audience as well as
scientists and other experts in the scientific discourse.
I’ve found that there are always people who know more about
^ http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?hea(lline=s2i2721
14
any given subject than I do, and I’m honored to have those people write
in and set me straight. Also, there are always people who write in even
though they know virtually nothing about the subject I’m writing about
- and if I can set just one of those people straight, that’s good for the
cause of science literacy.
Even when the comments I receive on my own Weblog, called
Cosmic Log, get the science wrong, I can usually depend on other readers
to correct the error. It’s good to be exposed to other points of view, even
if they seem wrong-headed. Over the six years that I’ve been doing the
blog, I think I’ve gained some insights into the thought processes behind
the belief in UFOs and the disbelief in evolution. I think those insights
help me engage the public better and force me to take a second look at
my own beliefs.
As online tools become more sophisticated - and more “social­
centric” - new methods may evolve for bridging the science-literacy gap.
Such methods could blend science coverage in printed publications with
Internet portals, discussion boards, and social-networking tools to create
a knowledgeable community around the news.
I’m even inclined to make my peace with Britney Spears. After
all, the Pew Internet survey found that two-thirds of all Internet users
came across news and information about science when they went online
for other reasons. In fact, the figures indicate that such “happenstance”
is the primary way that Internet users come across science news.
Those users might have started out looking for their daily
celebrity fix - but they came away learning something about science, and
getting smarter in the process. Depending on their experience, they
might even seek out more science stories online or in print.
If we can evolve new ways to get solid and relevant reports in
front of online readers, and adapt some of the tricks of the tabloid trade
- for good rather than evil, of course - well, maybe Britney Spears and
the chimps with spears will end up being on the same side after all.
15
Advisory Committee for the Alfred and Julia Hill Lectures
Hill Lecture Booklets
Dorothy Bowles Professor Emerita of Journalism & Electronic Media

Professor & Director Emeritus, School of Journalism & Previous Alfred & Julia Hill Lectures are available in booklet form. For a copy,
Janies A. Crook
Electronic Media contact the School of Journalism & Electronic Media, University of Tennessee.

George Everett Professor Emeritus of Journalism J

• .;i
Peter Gross Professor & Director, School of Journalism & Electronic Media 1989 John Noble Wilford Science as Exploration
Russel Hirst Associate Professor of English; 1991 Dorothy Nelkin Risk Communication and the Mass Media
Director, Program in Technical Communication

Kelly Leiter Meeman Professor Emeritus of Journalism; 1993 Gina Kolata Medical Reporting: Where the Story Lies
Dean Emeritus of the College of Communications
1994 Victor Cohn Reporting—Good and Bad—on Health in
Mark Littmann Professor, Julia G. & Alfred G. Hill Chair of Excellence America
in Science, Technology, and Medical Writing
1996 Jim Detjen Environmental News: Where Is It Going?
Dwight Teeter Professor of Journalism & Electronic Media;
former Dean of the College of Communications 1997 Jon Franklin The End of Science Writing
Joseph Trahem, Jr. Alumni Distinguished Professor of English 1999 Robert Kanigel The Perils of Popularizing Science
John Noble Wilford Science Correspondent and Senior Writer, The New York Times 2000 Science Journalism Across Two Centuries
John Noble Wilford
Michael Wirth Professor & Dean, College of Communication & Information
2001 Sharon Begley Why Science Journalism Isn't Science
2002 David Quammen Midnight in the Garden of Pact and Factoid
2003 John Rennie Naysaying the Nincompoops:
On Being a Maven in a Misinformed Era
Special Thanks
2004 Paula ApseU What’s Hot, What’s Not in Science Programming
The School ofJournalism and Electronic Media is deeply grateful to: 2005 Jonathan Weiner On the Writing of His Brothers Keeper:
A Story from the Edge of Medicine

2006 Michael D. Lemonick Crank or Genius - How Does a Science Writer

Society for Technical Communication, East Tennessee Chapter
Tell the Difference?
&
2007 Robert Krulwich What a Reporter Learns from Dylan, Coltrane,
Society of Professional Journalists, East Tennessee Chapter
and Chumbawamba: Journalism as Music
2008 Alan Boyle Britney Spears vs. Chimps with Spears:
for additional support of this Alfred & Julia Hill Lecture. Talking about Science in a Tabloid Culture

16
ra^UNIVERSITYpfTENNESSEE ur