Category: Good Writing

What I’m Reading: The Firebrand and the First Lady & Hidden Figures

Book Review, Good Writing, Real Women In Science, Science History, , , ,

The more I learn about and bear witness to the world, the more I’ve realized that my classroom education left out some aspects of history that give context to world and national events, and shape how I understand and interpret them. Reading is one of the best ways I’ve found to introduce missing perspectives and fill in gaps in my education.

Growing up I certainly had an awareness about the civil rights era–we learned about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X in school. But, even though I learned about these important people, there are so many others whose names I should also know, that I don’t. Pauli Murray and Katherine Johnson are just two of those names. Luckily, reading brought their stories into my world, and helped add depth to my knowledge about the various contributions of people of color to the United States during the civil rights era.

The Firebrand and The First Lady by Patricia Bell Scott

The Firebrand and The First Lady by Patricia Bell Scott

I learned about these two women by reading books that I think offered a lot of good information about US history and the role that women of color played in it: The Firebrand and the First Lady by Patricia Bell-Scott and Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.  Science writing and science history tend to comprise more of my reading list so Hidden Figures was in my conventional wheelhouse more so than the Firebrand and the First Lady, but both books were still quite different choices for me, being written by and about women of color. While I’m embarrassed by how little of my bookshelf came from or is about women and people of color, it is something that I can and am consciously fixing.

The Firebrand and the First Lady tells the story of the friendship between Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt. Murray was a lawyer, a civil rights and women’s rights activist, and the first black women to be ordained as an episcopal priest. Eleanor Roosevelt was the first lady of the United States from 1933-1945, US representative to the United Nations 1946-1953, and an important political figures in the women’s rights and civil rights movements. With neither woman alive to speak for themselves, the author draws heavily on the letters they wrote to each other.

Being able to see the letters they wrote to each other, especially when they disagreed, was amazing. It really was a snapshot from another time, where people with opposing views could find common ground and unite around a shared respect, treating each other with civility and thoughtfulness. It just struck me as sweet and sad that there was once a time when a young woman could reach out to a political figure and not just get a reply, but get true buy-in and a relationship that lasted the rest of their lives. I don’t think we currently live in such times, although this lovely piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas about how President Obama handled his mail, reading 10 letters a day from the public was a nice reminder about how important it is to have elected officials who hear you.

In telling the story of Murray and Roosevelt’s extraordinary friendship, the author gave an overview of the civil rights movement and the role that women played in it. But it was also an extremely American story, about how regular people built themselves up through education and hard work to leave an imprint on the world through the changes in policy and law that they helped bring about. The book left me not only knowing Murray’s name, but also with a profound respect for her.

I felt sympathy for Roosevelt, being a power broker but with limitations, and needing to figure out what she could do, what she should do, and how to pick which battles were the ones worth seeing through. She wasn’t able to do all that she wanted to, and yet she did so much more than most. But I was glad to see that Murray always held Roosevelt’s feet to the fire. In some ways, seeing Roosevelt’s responses felt like a master class in how to deal with criticism, and how there is always more that we can all do to help improve life for those around us. Being pushed to be better is a gift in many ways, but it’s also an endorsement of your own worth– that you’re worth improving.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.

Hidden Figures is quite a bit more well known, now that it has been made into a box office-topping film. Despite there being a movie version, the book is certainly worth your time. It tells the story of the black women “computers” (in the literal sense of “people who do computations,” but really mathematicians and engineers) who worked at NASA during its formation and at the dawn of the space race. It’s been written and said by others that the fact that this story hasn’t been told before is amazing. I certainly am not the first person to notice that this is a trend, the contributions of women of color being erased from the history that gets handed down. I’m glad that this book is as popular as it is because it is bringing this bit of history to the forefront and giving the amazing women whose story the book tells the place in history that they deserve.

One of the important things about Hidden Figures that has been said in this article and elsewhere is that, while it might be about events that took place from the 1940-1960s, there are still trends and themes from then that echo through research institutions today. Certainly for women of color working in physics today there are still numerous barriers to success and discrimination that white women and women in other fields don’t encounter.

Ultimately, I recommend both of these books, they are beautifully written and offer a point of view that I found incredibly valuable for expanding my understanding of the role that women of color played in US history. That context is important for understanding the tumultuous political climate of the world today, and I’m grateful to the authors for telling the stories of these women.

What I’m Reading: Two Years’ Worth

Book Review, Good Writing, Science History, , , ,

It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed any books on this blog, but that doesn’t mean I stopped reading. I have devoured quite a bit of non-fiction in the past two years with occasional forays into fiction. I want to share with you a list of the things I’ve been reading lately. Even though I read them all in the last two years, some of these books have been out for a long time, while some are more recently published. I don’t really have a set way of figuring out what I’m going to read; it really comes down to whatever attracts my attention. If it’s listed here, I enjoyed it in some capacity, but I certainly have my favorites that stood out to me more than others.

A sample of books from the past two years. Photo by Erin Podolak.

A sample of books from the past two years. Photo by Erin Podolak.

In non-fiction, I don’t think I could possibly say enough flattering things about Rust by Jonathan Waldman. I absolutely loved this book, but I was surprised by how much there is to say about a topic like rust. It’s an incredibly compelling story, and I learned a lot not only about the science of rust and it’s history but also about the problems rust poses in the United States today in terms of infrastructure. Having gone to college just steps away from the abandoned Bethlehem Steel mill, I also got a kick out of his adventures exploring the hulking ruins I’m so familiar with. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and completely recommend it for anyone who likes non-fiction and just learning about a new topic. I was also very impressed by The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell. It chronicles an interesting exercise in which the author watches and records what happens in a single patch of land for an entire year. I thought it was unique and beautifully written.

I read a lot of science history books; it’s probably the genre I find myself pulled toward the most. In this realm, I absolutely loved The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan; it certainly tells a side of the development of the atomic bomb that you don’t often see. I also read three books by Sam Kean, and enjoyed them all.  He does an amazing job of putting scientific topics into current and historical context. I find his books consistently entertaining. They’re full of fun narrative bits that bring the topics to life.  I also have to specifically mention The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl by Arthur Allen.  I was completely fascinated by this account of research using body lice during World War II, it was an aspect of the war that I’d never heard anything about. I was sharing fun facts about body lice with friends, family, and acquaintances for some time after I finished it. I think people probably got tired of hearing me say, “did you know….” and having the second half have to do with lice.

More books from my collection. Photo by Erin Podolak

More books from my collection. Photo by Erin Podolak

I haven’t listed below all of the fiction books I read, but one highlight was discovering Michael Crichton for books aside from Jurassic Park. I really enjoyed Sphere in particular. I also spent the better part of the two years listening to every Harry Potter audiobook. Somehow I managed to get to my mid-twenties never having read a single Harry Potter book– better late than never. It probably goes without saying that I loved them. I really enjoyed having them read to me by listening to the audiobooks; hearing everything pronounced in a British accent really puts the books over the top. I also read a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft, and the Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I was also a big fan of The Circle by Dave Eggers, although I have to admit I found the ideas it presents for our future quite frightening (like, haul up in a shack in the woods frightening). Which is the point, I think it’s supposed to do that.  Or at least make us think more critically about how much we share online, why we share it, and which entities we allow to own our information.

I go back and forth between reading paper books and using a Nook. In general, I tend to buy my non-fiction books as books because I truly wouldn’t mind living in a library (which seems possible in a small apartment sometimes). I usually don’t buy paper books for fiction, but I’ve read some that were borrowed. For fiction I typically rely on my e-reader, especially for collections and murder mysteries, which I’d say are my main guilty pleasure.

So, if you’re interesting in checking out some of the books that I’ve enjoyed here’s my list:

The Billion-Dollar Molecule – Barry Werth
Bossypants – Tina Fey
The Case of the Dueling Neuroscientists – Sam Kean
The Disappearing Spoon – Sam Kean
Driving Mr. Albert – Michael Paterniti
Empires of Light – Jill Jonnes
The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl – Arthur Allen
The Forest Unseen – David George Haskell
The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson
The Girls of Atomic City – Denise Kiernan
The Half Life of Facts – Samuel Arbesman
The Hunt for Vulcan – Thomas Levenson
I Was Told There’d Be Cake – Sloane Crosley
Infinitesimal – Amir Alexander
Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
Longitude – Dava Sorbel
The Map Thief – Michael Blanding
Merchants of Doubt – Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway
On the Move – Oliver Sacks
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember – Annalee Newitz
The Science of Harry Potter – Roger Highfield
The Secret History of Wonder Woman – Jill Lepore
The Skeleton Crew – Deborah Halber
Soul Made Flesh – Carl Zimmer
Thunderstruck – Erik Larson
Rust – Jonathan Waldman
The Violinist’s Thumb – Sam Kean
The Water Book – Alok Jha
Wild Ones – Jon Mooallem
Yes Please – Amy Poehler
10% Happier – Dan Harris

I also just want to mention that I wasn’t asked by any of the authors or publishers of the books listed above to review them or say nice things. No compensation, I just liked them and you might too.

Filling the Empty Page: Reading To Write

#sci4hels, Blogging, Book Review, Good Writing, Science

You’ve started a blog. Congratulations. Now what?

Of the many things I learned while in Journalism school, perhaps the bit of advice that I echo the most is that if you want to write well, you must read good writing. I’ve found this to be particularly true when blogging. If you want to blog about a topic it is extemely adventageous for you to be aware of what others have already said on the subject. It doesn’t do you or anyone else any good for you to produce content that is already out there (especially if your audience is smaller, and definitely if you don’t cover the topic as well as your peers.)

It has been my experience as a science blogger for three years that what you write doesn’t have to be the most timely, exciting thing on the Internet. Sure, those studies and stories that are making waves are great to write about, and when I blog about things like dinosaurs farting themselves to death I get a decent amount of traffic. But why would anyone care what I think of a study on dinosaurs when they could head over to Laelaps and read what Brian Switek has to say about it? Why would anyone care what I think about an infectous disease story when the world has Maryn McKenna’s Superbug? Or any chemical story when Deborah Blum has that beat superbly locked down?

I don’t think there is much value to writing about things that others have already covered, and covered well, unless there is some angle or something I feel like I can bring to the conversation. For the record, “I agree” doesn’t add much to the conversation – unless a topic is controversial and someone is getting attacked by the trolls and you want to show solidarity. If I do have something to say, in most of those cases it would probably be more beneficial as a blogger (especially a new bloger) to add a comment to those existing posts and jump into the conversation than sounding off in my own diatribe. There are, of course, exceptions when I do think it is worthwhile to toss in your two cents about a topic. But, in general if you aren’t going to blog about the latest splashy story, then what ARE you going to blog about?

What has made the traffic on my blog spike, and has increased my profile as a blogger more than anything else that I’ve done is to write about what interests me the most. Simple, I know, but I think when you are just starting out as a blogger it can be easy to feel like you need to be talking about what everyone else is talking about. The way to get noticed isn’t to join the herd, the way to get noticed is to do something that no one else is doing. Writing about what you feel most passionate about, regardless of everyone else, will make you stand out. Writing about something that matters to you, and gets you fired up, is in my humble opinion the key to writing an exciting post. If you’re excited, it will bleed through your writing.

Offer readers something they can’t get elsewhere – whether that is a manifestation of your childhood obsession with Amelia Earhart, a series of interviews with people you find interesting, or ramblings on your love/hate relationship with learning to code. Find answers to the questions that are bugging you, like when I decided to find out why the Scientific American blog network is so supportive of fledgling science writers. Your blog is your corner of the Internet, so carve it out for yourself. Make yourself at home. You wouldn’t decorate your home in a style that everyone else likes just because they like it, so don’t do it to your blog.

bestsciencewritingonlineAll this isn’t to say that the ideas are just going to start pouring onto the page. Just about every week I spend too much time staring at the empty screen trying to figure out what it is I want to say, and what matters enough to warrant a post, and throwing out all my bad ideas before I hit on something with a spark. Which brings me back to the advice I started with: read good writing. The idea for this post came from reading a collection of blog posts called The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (fomerly known as the Open Laboratory) the brainchild of series editor Bora Zivkovic and 2012 edition guest editor Jennifer Ouellette. The collection gets my sincere recommendation – if you have any interest in being a science blogger, you should check it out. Reading the posts in the collection inspired me, and reminded me how important it is to worry less about what you think everyone wants to read, and more about what you want to say.

The sheer diversity of topics, of styles, and of voices in this book is pretty astounding, and drives home the point that writing about what excites you is so important to having a successful blog. Reading all of those posts didn’t make me want to blog about any of the topics, but it did make me want to emulate every one of those writers’ ability to draw on what interests them and write about it in a way that is beautifully their own. Whether than means giving a voice to a fungus fairtale, telling us a tragedy worthy of Romeo and Juliet, or getting pissed off about the way the media ran with a story – all of the writers in The Best Science Writing Online 2012 gave me a piece of themselves in their posts. They are all great writers to be sure, but what makes the posts effective, makes them resonate, is the excitement and interest that they have in their subject whether they are writing about sperm, gin or pirates (really, you should read this collection.)

If you want to write a blog, find the time to read. I get ideas from other writers and other blogs all of the time. It’s never about copying the subject matter, the inspiration comes from putting my own twist on trends and ideas and figuring out what I want to say. I want to talk about what I read, so I write book reviews (even grossly out of date ones) and have started collecting weekly links of my Media Consumption. I want to share my passion for science so I interview researchers for Science For Six Year Olds. When I wanted to talk about grad school, and the job market, I did. When I wanted to write about pengiun sex (and then mention it in a job interview) I did. You don’t have to write about current science news to have ideas that are relevant and worth talking about. Reading other science blogs is the best way I’ve found to figure out what kind of science blogger you want to be and to figure out what fits for you. The Best Science Writing Online 2012 is a great place to start.

If you were to go back in the archives of my blog and see what I wrote about when I first started, it is really nothing like the Science Decoded that I have today. I started out writing a daily post about a science story plucked from the media. I almost never do that anymore. These days I blog more about issues related to being a blogger and a writer than I do about actual topics in science. I think this shift happened because right now I feel more passionate about sharing my experience as a writer than I do about actually doing more science writing (I am priviledged enough that science writing is my day job, afterall.) That’s not to say that I won’t shift back to writing more about scientific research, or to writing about current science news. There is absolutely a need for that type of analysis and for having those conversations online, but I’m not going to force myself to have an opinion about something when there are so many other topics that I actually do have an opinion on. As The Best Science Writing Online 2012 reminded me, your blog should never be a chore. If you always write about what interests you, it won’t be.

Medical History is Biography

Cancer, Good Writing, , , ,

The title of this post is a very elegant summation provided by Siddhartha Mukherjee of a talk that he gave at Harvard Medical School (HMS) last week. I was lucky enough to be at HMS (in the overflow room, sadly) to listen to Mukherjee’s talk. You may remember that I recently read and reviewed his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. I leapt at the chance to see him talk about his work because I loved the book so much, I gave it a full recommendation for everyone with no caveats, which doesn’t happen often.

Mukherjee was the speaker for the 37th annual Joseph Garland lecture, honoring the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine 1948-1968 and former president of the Boston Medical Library. Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, but he earned his MD from HMS and thus spent many hours in the Countway Library, which is the merged effort of HMS and the former Boston Medical Library. Mukherjee is every bit as eloquent when speaking as when writing, and I enjoyed hearing him articulate the thought process that went into his book.

The talk was called “Four Revolutions and a Funereal” and walked briefly through the history of cancer research (as much as one can in an hour) to arrive at present day. The four revolutions represented the greatest breakthroughs in the understanding of what cancer is: 1. Cancer is a disease of cells, 2. Cancer is a disease of genes, 3. Cancer is a disease of genomes, and 4. Cancer is an organismal disease. The fourth I found particularly interesting, and it is worth repeating Mukherjee’s explanation of how he defines organismal, “of or pertaining to an organism as a whole including its physiology, environment and interactions.” From everything I’ve learned in the last three months writing on a cancer biology beat, I feel like that statement certainly hits the nail on the head.

From the 1800’s when cancer was thought to be a disease caused by black bile and an imbalance of cardinal fluids, which Mukherjee jokingly called the “hydrolic theory of pathology,” our understanding of cancer has come a long way. But it seems like with every bit of progress made the field almost becomes murkier. The more we tease the problem apart, the more complicated we realize it is. From cell division, to genes that drive the process, to the proteins that control gene expression, it seems as though the smaller you go into the cell processes the more numerous the possibilities about what could go wrong get. Mukherjee closed his talk by saying that cancer is a disease of pathways, and that figuring out how to alter aberrant communication and information processing as it goes on within a cell is the future of cancer research.

Throughout the talk I was struck by the way Mukherjee managed to engage with a audience, perhaps a third of which was sitting with me in a room across the quad from where he was presenting. I was so captivated by his talk, which I thought was pretty impressive for watching a live stream. Just like in his book, he interspersed his talk with annecdotes that brought to life his personal quest for understanding which is what I think from listening to him really drove him to write the book in the first place.

An example of this is how he dedicated his book to Robert Sandler (1945-1948) a little boy who achieved a temporary remission from leukemia under Sidney Farber’s care at Boston Children’s Hospital. Though Sandler ultimately died of the disease his place in history was solidified by that landmark medical study. When Mukherjee was trying to track the identities of Farber’s early patients all he could come up with were the initials R.S. He never was able to find the identity through available records in the United States. He discovered who R.S. was while visiting his parents in India, the information was in the hands of a neighbor of theirs who was a historian and had a roster of Farber’s first chemotherapy patients. Mukherjee dedicated the book to the little boy, and after the book was published, he got a phone call from Robert Sandler’s twin brother who had seen the book in a store, opened to the dedication page and noticed his brother’s name.

This story hits at the heart of what Mukherjee meant when he said that “medical history is biography.” This holds true for science history in general. Discoveries made, research conducted, experiments performed, trials carried out – the personal narrative underscores everything. We always say that being able to craft a compelling narrative is critical to effective science communication, and this is why. People want to hear stories about other people, and science including medicine is inherently a story about people. As a speaker Mukherjee was able to do exactly what I admired so much in his book; he explained the science and told us where it was going, but he did so in a way pulled at our emotions, perceptions, and our ability to relate to other people. He made it human, driving home the idea that good writing doesn’t just serve to explain. Context is everything, and as writers our challenge is to make sense of science, to connect people with science through a context that they can understand.

If you haven’t read Emperor of All Maladies yet, you might want to get on that…

Book Review: The Emperor of all Maladies

Book Review, Cancer, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Good Writing

Due to my new job as a writer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute I now find myself writing on a cancer biology beat. I feel like there are two ways to cultivate a beat, either you can grow into a beat by developing the background knowledge and sources over time, or you can be tossed into a beat and have to do your homework very quickly to get up to speed. Obviously, taking a job at DFCI forced me to take my basic knowledge of cancer research to a higher level very quickly.

I still have a long way to go before I’ll feel comfortable with my cancer bio knowledge, but I’ve learned a lot from all of the great articles and books I’ve been reading over the last two months. One of the books I read on the recommendation of a colleague who said it really helped her when she started on this beat, was The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A former DFCI fellow, Mukherjee is a physician, scientist, and writer. He wrote The Emperor of all Maladies in 2010, and it received a tremendous amount of acclaim including the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

the-emperor-of-all-maladies-a-biography-of-cancer-1439107955-lVery rarely in a book review do I say that I think everyone should read a book. More often I recommend books with caveats that if you aren’t interested in the subject matter, don’t like nonfiction, have trouble staying focused, etc perhaps you won’t enjoy a book as much as I did. I am recommending The Emperor of all Maladies for everyone, regardless of what you normally read or are typically interested in. This book, and Mukherjee himself, deserve every ounce of praise that has been heaped upon them. There is a lot of information in The Emperor of all Maladies, and depending on how and where you read it might take you a long time to get through. It will be worth it.

I learned so much from this book, not just about cancer but about how to tell a long, complicated narrative in a way that is factual while still compelling. The patient narrative that the book starts and ends with brings a personal touch to the book, but the physicians, activists, and researchers interwoven into the story by Mukherjee also make this a deeply personal story. I think one of the biggest achievements of this book is being able to meld science and history to provide a foundation for the cast of characters that drive home the human impact of cancer.

The Emperor of all Maladies is masterful at doing something that so much science writing on the web and elsewhere fails to do – it provides background and context for all of the claims that it makes. Granted, developments that have advanced our knowledge of cancer biology aren’t particularly controversial, but it is still necessary to illuminate the scientific process and make clear how these discoveries come to be. This book is just solid in so many ways. The structure is great, and very effectively drives the narrative forward. The personal stories add so much to the overall understanding of cancer and its impact. The science and medical information is clear and easy to understand.

There is just so much that you can learn from this book. I don’t think I’ve come across another resource that was as interesting and entertaining while being as informative about all of the issues involved in cancer than this one. I recommend it to everyone because cancer is something that affects us all, if you don’t have it yourself then you know someone who has had to face that diagnosis. The Emperor of all Maladies really is a biography of cancer, and the crash course that I think we all could stand to go through for a better understanding of this disease.