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A Newsletter Exploring
Biomedical Research Issues For Middle & High School Educators
Volume 1, Issue 10, Winter 2006

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If Science is So Important...

Continued from page 1...

Try as I might, Discover Magazine wasn't quite ready to have me as its new editor, so I had to start out in a weekly newspaper in the far suburbs of Chicago, covering school boards, township tax rates, late-night stabbings outside seedy bars, and the occasional small plane crash. But I was naturally drawn toward environment stories about suburban sprawl, rampant lake weeds and leaky sewer systems.

Two jobs later, at the height of early 1990s environmentalism, all these threads came together when I joined The Ann Arbor News as the environment writer. Science and medicine were soon added to my beat and I was riding the most engrossing learning curve I'd ever encountered. I was still doing journalism, but it required a decent grasp of electromagnetic spectra, human anatomy, cell biology and statistics, and the ability to grind the complex down to the simple. It didn't require graduate school science chops, just enough basic literacy to grasp the high points of the journal article, get a good interview and then explain the concepts to our theoretical eighth-grader.

I was in love (still am, in fact). Science is truly news. Everything in politics, crime, sports and business has happened before, and will likely happen again. But when somebody says they found a new species of dinosaur or landed an instrument on another planet, that's truly new. And because it's new, you can't just plagiarize somebody else's explanation. You're going to have to 'get it' yourself first.

There are a lot of folks like me laboring in the background out there, mostly working for universities, but also in the science sections of major newspapers and magazines, the cable channels, nonfiction books, patient education materials, and increasingly websites and blogs.

I even tell myself I'm doing a social good. Most Americans, as you know too well, aren't exactly geeked about science and math these days. Yet they take their cell phones and antibiotics completely for granted. An important part of my job is to help people see how science and technology affect them personally, and to get them to share in the excitement of discovery just a little. From that, I hope that they'll support more education and research and respect science a little better, even when they don't entirely understand it.

Seven Steps to Being a Science Journalist

1. Do your homework. Read at least a little something about the topic you're covering, and better yet, about the person you're talking to, BEFORE you have the interview. You don't have to memorize every detail, but showing you tried makes a world of difference.
2. Ask really stupid questions. Don't just nod and pretend you understood that bit about glyco-proteins. If it sailed past your head and seems to be a critical detail, stop the scientist and ask her to translate a little. Better to look stupid in the interview than on the printed page!
3. The flipside of #2 is that you don't have to understand absolutely everything. You're after just the core importance of this bit of science news, not the entire background, history, meaning through time. Let some details and professorial digressions slide, but be sure you get the big picture and its salient pieces.
4. Practice active listening. Repeat back to the scientist what you think you heard in your own words. If you're right, good! If you're wrong, better yet! They'll put you back on track before you embarrass yourself.
5. Write for your reader, not the scientist. Explain the new bio-markers for prostate cancer to your grandpa, in words and concepts he'll understand. He's the one who needs to know about them. The scientists need your help communicating with the world; it's your job to boil their stuff down to an enticing, digestible treat.
6. Metaphors and analogies are your best friends. It's shaped like a... It's the size of a... It acts like a... (Danger — there is no such thing as an "Olympic-sized swimming pool" for you to put that drop of poison into. Just don't do it.)

7. Read, read, read as if your life depended on it. Cereal boxes, websites, Science News, Discover, Science, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, National Geographic, the Tuesday New York Times, nonfiction bestsellers. The more you read, the more you understand.

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BioFocus
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