The Guys Talk

By: | November 11, 2011

About an hour into a long interview, the scientist relaxes, stops using words that might look good on a funding application, and starts saying things like: “Here’s a picture of our immediate neighborhood.  Here’s the Milky Way, that’s us.  Here’s the Andromeda Nebula, that’s our nearest friend.  And there are a bunch of little guys in our immediate vicinity.  The whole shooting match is winging off in this direction.”

This particular scientist, Princeton’s Jim Peebles, talks about galaxies as though they’re folks he knows personally.  This is anthropomorphising and it’s strictly against scientists’ union rules.  But they do it anyway – not all of them, just certain ones – and they do it regardless of field, almost unconsciously, and with joy. Continue reading →

Do readers grasp nuance?

By: | November 10, 2011

When my editor at Slate asked me to look into the link between statins and violent behavior, I thought the idea was crazy. But as I dug into the issue, I decided that there was an important story there. I’m still not entirely convinced that statins cause aggressive or violent behavior in some small subset of users, but after looking into the evidence, I’m convinced that the FDA system for tracking drug side effects is not equipped to tell us for sure.

The story I ended up writing ran with the headline “Lipitor Rage” and the dek, “If statins carried a rare but serious side effect, would we ever find out?” (In some contexts it was headlined “Lipitor Rage and the Problem of Rare Side Effects.”) The story wasn’t really about statins, but about whether the FDA’s current surveillance system can detect rare drug side effects, such as the purported one between statins and violence.

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Making a Better Heart

By: | November 9, 2011

This fall, I did something that I’ve done only once before in three decades of writing: for two whole weeks I booked off work and took a real vacation. Freelance writers can rarely afford half-month-long holidays. But I had spent a good part of 2010 in cardiac wards, tending to my visibly failing father and watching his fellow patients shuffle down the corridors clutching small oblong pillows to their chests. The pillows reminded them of the incisions from their open-heart surgery, and hence their physical limitations. My father, too, hugged one of those pillows. But open-heart surgery could not fix what was ailing him.

After his funeral, I realized that I needed to take time off and go somewhere far away from the haunted faces of those corridors. So I chose a destination that seemed to brim with joie de vivre, a kind of anti-cardiac ward—the small medieval town of Lucca in Italy. It didn’t hurt that Lucca lay in one of the heartlands—so to speak—of the Mediterranean Diet. I was interested in that diet. A family history of early heart disease increases one’s risk. Continue reading →

What Would John McPhee Do?

By: | November 7, 2011

When I’m thrashing through the brambles of a first draft, no story in sight, I have one reliable lifeline. WWJMD? What would John McPhee do to get himself out of this #%&! mess?

This, after all, is the guy who found fascinating stories in citrus cultivation. And geology. And Switzerland! Some of his writing is now two generations old, and not, shall we say, of smartphone-friendly lengths. But his work holds up. He knows what readers don’t know they want to know, and he knows how to tell them about it. Those gifts don’t expire.

There are a lot of answers to WWJMD, and a lot of places to find them. You can read his books and pore over The New Yorker archives. You can get hold of the charming and instructive Paris Review interview by his former Princeton student, MacArthur-award-winning journalist Peter Hessler. Or, best of all, you can hear from the man himself.

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A Thousand Words

By: | November 4, 2011

 

“Math and graphs are necessary to make a story like this interesting.”

“He doesn’t provide any drawings or graphs, which would have appealed to and been understood by many readers.”

“He tries to describe graphs without using any pictures at all … why? I myself would also have liked some representation of the mathematics, because I believe that many of those interested in this kind of topic has had at least some math & science education, and the others can ignore them.”

Many has, I’m sure. But despite what these online comments about my most recent book contend, the crucial question for someone writing about science for a non-specialist audience is: Will “the others”—readers without the benefit of a math or science education—actually ignore the graphs and charts and equations, or will they, fanning pages in the New Nonfiction aisle or idly clicking “Look Inside!” online, find themselves confronting their inner eighth grader’s greatest nightmare, and go buy The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Subject-Verb Agreement instead?

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Alcohol, Retinol and a 50-Year Quest for the Male Pill

By: | November 3, 2011

Last Sunday, the day before the world’s population hit 7 billion, I went to a scientific meeting on the future of contraception.

I had expected to hear, and did hear, about a slew of labs trying to develop a birth control pill for men. What I did not expect: one pill was shown to work in men more than 50 years ago.

In the late 1950s, researchers from the University of Oregon and University of Washington tested drugs called ‘bis(dichloroacetyl) diamines’ on inmates from the Oregon State Penitentiary.* The scientists doled out one of three pills — dubbed Win 13,099, Win 17,416 and Win 18,446 — to 26 volunteers once or twice a day for up to 54 weeks, and measured the men’s sperm counts along the way.

The results were stunning: the compounds reduced the amount of sperm in the men’s semen, and sometimes completely wiped it out. The pills didn’t affect libido, and the only reported side effect was bloating and gas. What’s more, within a few weeks of stopping treatment, sperm counts went back up. It was, perhaps, the horny grail: reversible birth control for men, no rubber required.
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Still Just a Rat in a Cage

By: | November 1, 2011

 

 

As a journalist, I tend to be wary of people trying to assign me stories if they’re not an editor, and sometimes even then. Public relations types try to do it all the time. They send press releases with pre-packaged quotations for the deadline-driven writer or call up with some brilliant story idea that never really smells like news. So when Gregory A. Prince – the CEO of a company that specializes in combating pediatric viral diseases – approached me at a conference and told me he had the perfect story for me, I was prepared for a tone-deaf corporate pitch.

What I got instead was impassioned advocacy for his favourite rodent. Or at least for its use in pharmaceutical research.

The hispid cotton rat (Sigmodon hispidus) is a cute little shrew-like thing that makes its nest out of cotton and has a rich brown coat of fur. It looks nothing like a lab rat, but has unique advantages over those ubiquitous albino strains of Rattus norvegicus, in that it models certain human diseases far more faithfully. That is to say, cotton rats can catch infectious diseases – especially respiratory viruses – other rodents can’t. For example, they’re the only rodents whose lung tissue after nasal injection replicates the measles virus, still the most lethal infectious disease of infants in the world. This discovery allows researchers an intermediate, less ethically troubling model between their tissue cultures and their primate measles subjects, macaques.

Though it was the first model animal used in polio research, the cotton rat is underutilized, largely through historical accident. Continue reading →