A good profile of a scientist goes beyond the science itself — and that’s why Helen Pearson’s ears perked up when she learned the personal story of Joe Thornton, a University of Oregon evolutionary biologist whose first career was as a Greenpeace activist, fighting the release of toxic industrial chemicals. Pearson wanted to know what [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews 
Tags: Carpenter, Drafts, Nature, Notes, Pearson, Pitches, Profile, Writer Interview 
No Comments »The three cosmologists who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for the 1998 discovery of the accelerating universe were only a few of the dozens of scientists, working on two competing teams, who contributed to the discovery. In a show of team-spirited solidarity, those fortunate enough to be recognized by the Nobel committee invited [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Bhattacharjee, Erdmann, Narrative, Physics, Science, Writer Interview No Comments »Clever Apes, a science series that airs on the Chicago public radio station WBEZ, won the 2011 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award in the Radio category. Gabriel Spitzer, host and founder of the show, created the WBEZ science beat, and works with producer Michael De Bonis on the bimonthly segment. In this TON podcast, Spitzer [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Clever Apes, Graber, Guest Contributor, Kavli Awards, Podcast, Spitzer, Writer Interview No Comments »When hundreds of snow geese landed in and subsequently died from Berkeley Pit’s toxic water, some of the microbes the geese carried found a home in the Butte, Montana lake and started soaking up the lake’s toxins. Bioremediation, however, isn’t the subject of Radiolab senior producer Soren Wheeler’s story, “Even the worst laid plans?” Instead, [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Environment, Frederick, Guest Contributor, Podcast, Radiolab, Wheeler, Writer Interview, Wu No Comments »David Tuller has never shied away from controversial stories. Writing for The New York Times for the last dozen years, he has covered a wide range of topics, including infectious diseases, gay men’s health, his mom’s 80th birthday, and most recently, chronic fatigue syndrome. Tuller recently wrote a long piece that painstakingly examines, in a [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Biomedicine, Guest Contributor, Pitches, Rehmeyer, Tuller, Writer Interview 41 Comments »When Slate senior editor Daniel Engber took a month off from his usual duties to research a multi-part series on laboratory mice, he had a thesis — that although the ubiquity of mice as model organisms has clear advantages, it is in some ways damaging to biomedicine. What he needed was stories and characters to [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Biomedicine, Carpenter, Drafts, Engber, Historical Research, Longform, Notes, Slate, Tools, Writer Interview 3 Comments »Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Blum’s five books have immersed her in the worlds of animal rights, the psychology of affection, the neurology of sex, the search for paranormal phenomena, and the chemistry of poisons. Her best-selling book The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, published in 2010, traces [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Blum, Books, Drafts, Edits, Guest Contributor, Madhusoodanan, Narrative, Notes, Poisoner's Handbook, Structure, Writer Interview No Comments »Rebecca Skloot needs little introduction to most readers of The Open Notebook: Her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has been a bestseller since its publication in February 2010, and she has toured the U.S. and Europe almost constantly since then talking about the book and the many issues of race, science, and privacy [...]
For years, journalist Lauren Gravitz had planned to write an in-depth feature on Rockefeller University physician-scientist Ralph Steinman, highlighting the dendritic cells that had been his life’s work and his efforts to use those cells to treat his own cancer. Formerly a science writer at Rockefeller, Gravitz had spoken often with Steinman and knew his [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Carpenter, Drafts, Edits, Gravitz, Narrative, Nature, News, Pitches, Profile, Writer Interview 1 Comment »Reporting from the trenches in the war over dolphin rights, freelance science writer Erik Vance relates the story of Lori Marino and Diana Reiss, dolphin researchers who have spent most of their careers as close colleagues and friends, but whose agendas diverged after Marino moved away from research on captive dolphins and immersed herself in a [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Discover, Drafts, Environment, Erdmann, Narrative, Vance, Writer Interview 1 Comment »For the residents of Lakeshore, Ontario, the black fungus caking their homes was a problem, and they blamed the local distillery. For James Scott, the Sherlock Holmes of fungi, the identity of the unsightly mold was a mystery waiting to be solved. And for Adam Rogers, senior editor at Wired, Scott’s quest was a story that [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Biology, Drafts, Guest Contributor, Kavli Awards, Pitches, Rogers, Wired, Writer Interview, Yong 6 Comments »On September 18, 2011, the front page of the Sunday edition of The New York Times carried a story remarkable to find in any newspaper: a 7,300-word story that was almost all narrative. Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World, written by Times staffer Amy Harmon, followed a young autistic man named Justin [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Dobbs, Guest Contributor, Harmon, Narrative, Notes, NYTimes, Writer Interview 8 Comments »