SFSYO Scientist of the Month: Penny Higgins
Science For Six-Year-Olds (SFSYO for this school year) is a recurring segment on Science Decoded for Mrs. Podolak’s first grade class at Lincoln-Hubbard elementary school. This year the posts are inspired by #iamscience (also a Tumblr) and#realwomenofscience two hashtags on twitter that drove home for me the importance of teaching people who scientists are and what they really do.
Hello first graders! I am so excited to share with you our first scientist of the month, Penny Higgins, PhD. I asked Penny a bunch of questions to find out more about what she does. I hope you will enjoy learning more about her. Below you can read my interview with Penny, and if you’d like to ask her any questions, be sure to leave them in the comments!
Summer 2012. Courtesy of Penny Higgins.
Erin: What type of scientist are you?
Penny: I am a vertebrate paleontologist, which means I study fossil animals that have bones (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Dinosaurs in are in this category too.) I am also a geochemist, which means I study the chemistry of geological things like rocks. These are related because bones and teeth are made of a mineral (called apatite). I study the chemistry of fossil teeth and bones to learn about what extinct animals ate and what the environment was like (how warm was it? how much did it rain?) when they were alive.
Erin: What did you study in school, and where did you go?
Penny: I studied both geology and biology in school, since fossils come out of rocks (geology) and represent animals that were once alive (biology). I also took a lot of chemistry classes. I ultimately got a PhD in Geology. I went to school in Colorado for five years, then went for another five years in Wyoming, where I got my PhD. Then I studied another four years after that in Florida. Now I live in Rochester, NY.
Erin: Where do you work?
Penny: I work at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, New York. My main job is to manage a laboratory where we measure the chemical properties of rocks and minerals. We also analyze things like hair, bugs, and flowers. I also teach beginning geology and a couple of paleontology classes. During the summer, I travel all over to collect fossils (and rocks) for my research.
Erin: What do you do on a typical day?
Penny: Most days during the school year, the first thing I do in the morning is start a set of analyses on our mass spectrometer. Then I go and teach classes, work with students on their research projects, and make sure that everyone is getting good data. When things are quiet I do my own research.
Erin: Why did you become a scientist?
Penny: I loved science from the moment I knew what it was. I was hooked by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos videos [Cosmos is an old TV series, you first graders wouldn’t know it but maybe your parents will!] I also enjoyed drawing animals, especially horses, and started to study their anatomy and the shapes of their bones. Once I realized I liked bones, I wanted to draw dinosaurs and started to study them so I could draw better pictures. That’s why I became a paleontologist. What’s funny is that, now that I really am a paleontologist, I’ve never done anything with dinosaurs, but I have looked at fossil horses!
Courtesy of Penny Higgins.
Erin: What is your favorite thing about your job?
Penny: My favorite thing is the discovery. I learn things that no one else has ever known before. And I get to share what I learned with other people, so everyone can know more. I also get to go to some really neat places, like Bolivia, or the Arctic, where no-one else hardly ever goes!
Erin: What is something about your job that might surprise us?
Penny: I work in a laboratory, but it’s nothing like what you think. We only sometimes wear white coats. We listen to loud music. I’ve named all of the scientific instruments (Specky, the mass spectrometer; Norm, the water analyzer; Tina, the laminar flow hood). And there’s a talking chicken hanging in the lab.
Erin: What are some of the things that you like to do for fun?
Penny: Besides being a scientist, I have other hobbies. I am a writer, and I am about 600 pages into writing my first novel. It’s not about paleontology at all. It’s set in medieval Europe. I like to sew and make costumes, and then wear those costumes at Renaissance Festivals (where people dress up like it’s the time of knights and swords). I am really interested in medieval history.
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What do you think first graders? It seems to me like Penny has a pretty cool job, and that she has a lot of fun too! Is there anything else you’d like to know about her work as a scientist? Be sure to leave her questions in the comments.
For any of my regular readers, all kids at heart I know, you can also check out Penny on twitter @paleololigo. If you’d like to be featured as a scientist of the month, send me an email or DM me on twitter, I’d love more volunteers – but I’ll beg if I have to!
Guest Post: Anna Tomasulo On HealthMap
This week I am happy to be hosting a post on Science Decoded by guest blogger Anna Tomasulo, project coordinator for Healthmap and Editor-in-Chief of The Disease Daily. Please note that I am not personally promoting Healthmap as a service, I just think it is an interesting case-study of the way the internet can be harnessed to gather data in real-time so I asked Anna to give us some background.
I never focused too long on the myriad of ways that the Internet has changed our lives, until recently. This past February, The Atlantic published excerptsof Polish pundit Piotr Czerski’s “manifesto” titled, “We, the Web Kids.” The essay put my relationship to the Internet into a new light- particularly when compared to how my parents, for example, interact with the Web. “The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it,” writes Czerski. The Web kids rely on this shared memory drive; we extract information, contribute to it, and re-post it at our leisure. We learn about new scientific research at home and participate virtually in uprisings across the ocean. Geographic barriers dissolve. And we expect to do this all instantaneously; we want it “here and now, without waiting for the file to download.”
This essay also put my first post-graduate school job into a new light. Admittedly, I am not very tech savvy; I’ve always thought of myself more as a qualitative, literature-oriented person. But my international experience, French language skills, and recently acquired MPH landed me at HealthMap, a research group, co-founded by a software developer and an epidemiologist, that uses online media to track infectious diseases worldwide. And it does this in real time, in an almost completely automated manner.
HealthMap was founded in 2006 by John Brownstein, PhD and Clark Freifeld, MS. Back then, Brownstein and Freifeld understood that there was a large gap between the beginning of an infectious disease outbreak and the public becoming aware of and responding to that outbreak. They attributed this lag to traditional public health reporting, which is often troubled by structural hierarchies and geographic and political barriers. For example, a typical public health worker in a small, remote village may take note of a strange syndrome that is surfacing in a handful of young kids. He or she might provide that information to medical professionals who will want to take samples for analysis. Well, the samples will need to be sent to laboratories miles away and it’s rainy season so the roads are washed out. Let’s say the samples did get to the lab. Once an infectious disease agent is confirmed, the report will then move on to district, national and then international officials. This whole process could take weeks. And during those weeks, infectious diseases can spread.
Brownstein and Freifeld recognized that there was a wealth of information available through the Internet that would fundamentally change the picture of global health. So, they created a freely available online platform that gave people access to this information.
Essentially, the system mines the Web for formal and informal sources of infectious disease news. Data is collected by carefully developed language specific search strings (HealthMap has news feeds in over a dozen languages) that sift through various news aggregators (Google News, Baidu, allAfrica), RSS feeds, mailing lists and chat rooms. The collected data is then automatically assigned a pathogen and location of the outbreak, based on information in the article (or chat room, mailing list, etc.). Then, the system determines the relevancy of each alert and filters it into one of six categories: Breaking, Context, Warning, Old News, Non-Disease Related, or International Significance. Any duplicate data is clustered together. The end product, http://healthmap.org, is a highly organized data set that allows public health officials, international travelers, government agencies and interested community members to access a real-time view of infectious disease outbreaks around the globe.
The HealthMap platform has been used to track public health threats in many contexts. Every year before the Hajj, we begin heightened disease surveillance on the countries that send the most pilgrims, and post all infectious disease news from these countries to a map created especially for Hajj. Similarly, we mine formal and informal sources for information regarding the wildlife trade because of its role in spreading zoonotic diseases.
The Internet has radically changed our way of life. It is no longer a tool that we use to perform a specific task or a tool that requires special training to use; it is an interactive system where people can deposit and build upon collected intelligence- an idea that Czerski hints at and with which Mike Kuniavsky, an entrepeneur who studies people’s relationships to digital technology, agrees. In 2008, Kuniavsky explained that all real world objects have “information shadows,” or digital representations, that exist on the Internet. These information shadows can be built upon and interacted with by other users. As a result, the Internet grows exponentially.
Arguably, HealthMap takes information shadows of disease outbreaks (local news reports, tweets, chat room questions, status updates, etc.) and augments official public health reports with real time information. But what makes HealthMap truly unique, is that it takes the informal information, or information shadows, and automatically makes it immediately useful to those who can act upon it.
Czerski differentiated our generation from others by pointing out that we are the first generation that exists not on paper, but on and through the Web. HealthMap is exemplary of the Web kid generation, as it has transported information disease tracking to the Web, and made it an immediate and global process. Not only is outbreak information available online and in real time, but it is also freelyavailable. Czerski finishes the manifesto with: “What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is.” As a freely available site, HealthMap provides international users with knowledge to make informed health-related decisions. A true product of the Web kids, HealthMap has leveraged the power of the Web, and our existence on it, to improve disease surveillance and timely responses.
Book Review: The Emperor of all Maladies
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.
Very 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.
Science For Six-Year-Olds: Introducing The Scientist of the Month Segment
Science For Six-Year-Olds is a recurring segment on Science Decoded for Mrs. Podolak’s first grade class at Lincoln-Hubbard elementary school. This year the posts are inspired by #iamscience (also a Tumblr) and #realwomenofscience two hashtags on twitter that drove home for me the importance of teaching people who scientists are and what they really do.
Hello first graders, welcome to Science Decoded! I am so excited to be writing posts just for you this school year. We are going to have a lot of fun blogging together, because we are going to have a special year-long spotlight on who scientists are and what they do. We’ll have our first Scientist of the Month in October, but before we do I first want to find out what you know about scientists.
What do you think a scientist looks like? Are they all wrapped up in a laboratory like this person on the right? How would you describe a scientist? Are they smart, funny, kind, brave, patient, or happy? Do scientists get to have fun? What do you think scientists do all day? How old do you have to be to be a scientist? Are scientists boys or girls or both? Do any of you know anybody who is a scientist? What are they like?
The reason I wanted to do this segment for you is because scientists aren’t any one thing. Yes, they are all bound together by the fact that they very systematically analyze information to learn new things. But scientists are a very diverse group – they are lots of different people, with many different interests and backgrounds. Scientists also study all kinds of different things. A scientist can study plants, animals, cells, chemicals, energy, the way things move, medicine, space and how to build or put things together in addition to a lot of other stuff!
Scientists are important to all of us, because they work hard to try to figure out things about the world that we don’t know. There used to be a time when people didn’t know that all living things are made of cells, but today we know so much more about them and have learned that understanding what goes on in cells is critically important. What are some of the things that you know about that scientists have discovered? Do you know the names of any scientists?
I hope you have had a good time talking about who scientists are and what they do. I’m really looking forward to introducing you to some great scientists and helping you learn more about what it means to be a scientist. Our first scientist is a paleontologist and geochemist (don’t worry, we’ll learn what that means) but in the meantime if you have any questions for me, feel free to leave them in the comments.
I’m not a scientist, I’m a science writer. I went to school to learn how to research, report on, and write stories about scientists and what they discover. But, even though I’m not a scientist, helping share scientists’ ideas is my specialty. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do that with these posts!
The Question of Code
Earlier this week Bora Zivkovic (@boraz) blogs editor at Scientific American tossed out the following links on twitter, and asked for thoughts. Both links were to articles from the Nieman Journalism Lab, the first Want to produce hirable grads, journalism schools? Teach them to code and the second News orgs want journalists who are great a a few things, rather than good at many present two different ways of thinking about the skills journalists need to have. The links started a conversation on twitter (excerpted below) between Bora, Rose Eveleth (@roseveleth) Kathleen Raven (@sci2mrow) Lena Groeger (@lenagroeger) and myself (@erinpodolak) I felt like there was more to say on the topic, so I decided to take it to the blog so that I could respond to everyone’s points without the confines of twitter brevity.
I definitely agree with this point from Rose, there are so many different skills you use as a journalist but a lot of what you need to know will vary based on your personal style and interests, what platform you write for, and what topics you are covering. I’ve found that I learned a lot more from going out and actually chasing down stories than I did sitting in classrooms. Of course, the guidance of journalism school makes learning by trial and error much less perilous than it can otherwise be, so classroom lessons have value too.
I moaned an awful lot about how scary being turned loose into the unemployed masses at the end of grad school seemed. Journalism has adapted to changes in viewership, platform and the poor economy, and so too must journalists or we run the risk of ceasing to be relevant. Making yourself as employable as possible is a good thing, but only if you are going after jobs where you can really contribute. You’ll only be able to contribute if either you know what you are doing or you have the desire and the drive to learn what to do. This thought brings me to the next point I made, not all the skills journalists use will appeal to all journalists. As a profession we can do a lot of different things, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to do everything.
If you are looking for a job, you have to be honest with yourself and your resume. I think for young journalists there is a temptation to trumpet skills that we only sorta, kinda, maybe have from that two hour seminar we sat through that one time. You can fit what I know about code on the head of a pin, and I’ve sat through basic training courses multiple times. My resume says nothing about being able to code, because I honestly don’t know how. It is always better to be honest about what you know. If you aren’t an expert in something, don’t claim to be. All you’ll do is disappoint possible employers. I think you can go a lot farther being honest about where you are with your skills, if you don’t know code but would like to then say so. If you’ve edited a video once or twice and would like to continue developing those skills then say so. Just don’t make yourself into an expert in something when you aren’t.
I recently graduated from the professional track Master’s program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a program that with only three core courses is left purposely open for students to do their own exploring. So what exploring did I do? I chose to spend my time taking science classes (mostly zoology) learning more about narrative writing and structure, and getting a better handle on social media, personal branding and marketing myself online. All good things to learn while at school, but I didn’t learn code. I honestly have zero interest in code, it isn’t something I’ve ever wanted to do, I don’t have the patience for it and I feel like my brain just doesn’t absorb even the basic information about code whenever it is presented to me. But that doesn’t make me an inept science writer. Kathleen Raven joined the conversation, and brought up the following reason why not knowing code can still be okay.
Part of the reason I think I haven’t been particularly motivated to learn code is because I haven’t needed it. I was able to set up this blog and my website (www.erinpodolak.com) on WordPress using basic templates that suited my needs. I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and G+ but none of these online activities involve needing to write my own code. To do what I want to online I haven’t run into the need to write code. Kathleen then made another point about a science journalism skill, the ability to do math, which can be overlooked but is important to a writer’s skill set.
Being able to do the math to fact check research reports and call bullshit when necessary is an important part of the reporting that science journalists do for their stories. If you know code but can’t do math, you have a critical weakness in your skill set. In my opinion the same goes for being able to structure stories successfully, and handle difficult interviews well. If you don’t have the basics, then the extras like code are just floating out there on your resume with no foundation. Being really good at the basics, and then selectively adding skills based on what you find that you need to know, and what you find you would like to know seems like a solid way to go about building your skill set. I think this gets us to the last points that Rose made:
You need to do something that you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy code then in my opinion you shouldn’t feel like it is an essential skill to have. You might want to be the kind of journalist that can do it all, kudos to you for that. But, I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting to have a few select skills and being really good at them. If you are honest with yourself and honest with employers I think you can definitely learn an array of skills that suit you and your job. We have options, and that is a great thing. Happy times, indeed.
Note: This is only a brief excerpt from the first few days of this conversation. Much more was said, including more back and forth between Lena, Rose and myself about skills and how to present yourself to employers and from Bora, Lena, Rose and Dan Fagin (@danfagin) about the structure of jschool programs and the balance needed to meet students needs. Still plenty more to say about these topics!
This conversation took place before we started the hashtag #sci4hels to mark all of the tweets. Be sure to monitor the hashtag in the future to see more of the on going discussion between Kathleen, Lena, Rose, Bora, myself and others!
Book Review: Newjack Guarding Sing Sing
When I try to explain to friends and family why I prefer to read nonfiction I usually tell them it is because the best stories are the ones that are true. Yes, making things up and presenting them in a way that is creative, entertaining, eloquent, and even beautiful takes skill and talent. I’m not arguing against fiction in general, I will certainly concede that there are wonderful works of fiction. There is definitely something appealing about getting lost in a made up world. However, it is my personal experience that I find myself more compelled and moved by stories that I know are real.
I’m of the opinion that what happens in real life can be so fascinating that you can be transported completely into another time and place within this world rather than the Middle Earths or Panems of fiction. We see the world from a point of view that is shaped and focused by our own experience, knowledge and understanding about the way that things work. But the scope of my world is narrow. There are a lot of things in this world that I know absolutely nothing about. In a lot of instances, this is because I have had a very comfortable life. I want to understand the rest of the world, but can you ever really understand something that you haven’t experienced yourself?
I ask this most rhetorical of questions because I recently finished reading Ted Conover’s 2000 book about the New York State prison system Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Conover is the kind of writer that I think anyone who has ever dreamed about writing nonfiction thinks that they would love to be, until you realize exactly what he goes through to get his story. Combining anthropology with nonfiction writing Conover has made a career out of becoming his subject. Two years ago I read his first book, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes, for which he became a hobo and rode around the country in the cars of freight trains. For Newjack, he went through training to become a prison guard and spent a year working in New York’s Sing Sing prison. Talk about being transported into a completely different world, within our world.
I couldn’t tell you the first thing about what the inside of a prison is like, but Conover can. He created a completely different life to infiltrate Sing Sing and become a part of the prison. I don’t think I’ve ever read another writer’s work that so successfully opened a door to give readers a look inside a type of life that many of us will never even come close to understanding. The drama of Newjack is entirely wrapped up in the fact that it really happened. Conover isn’t just retelling stories; he’s telling his own story wrapped up into his subject. You can feel his fear, his stress, his exhaustion, his amusement, his appreciation for the kindness of others, and his strong desire to try to understand.
A book like Newjack illustrates my opinion that the best stories are the ones that are true. Not only did it increase my knowledge and understanding about a place, a system, and people that I would never on my own come into contact with, but it also tapped into the rawness of the human experience. The darkside of reality seethes through Newjack. It pushes you forward, and combined with the knowledge that it all really happened it opens up a world within the world. It isn’t really a fun read, but I think it is a necessary read. I recommend Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, and am looking forward to checking out Conover’s other work.
Vacation Adventure: The La Brea Tar Pits
During my nearly three week blogging hiatus (caused mostly by the fact that I moved and started a new job) I also took my first trip to California. It was recommended to me on twitter that I check out the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, which when I looked it up led me to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. The Page Museum houses one of the world’s largest collections of late Pleistocene fossils and is the only constantly active urban Ice Age excavation site in the world. Mammoths? Yes, please. So my family (also intrigued, though not as much as I was) agreed to make a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits during our trip, and boy was it a tar pit. But it was also so much more.
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| Yup, that would be tar. Credit: Erin Podolak |
The La Brea Tar Pits are located in Los Angeles. The area of Hancock Park (where the lake pit pictured above and the museum are located) has crude oil underneath it. The oil seeps up along fault lines and when it reaches the surface it forms pools and becomes asphalt. The tar has been seeping up for tens of thousands of years, and at times would be deep and thick enough to trap animals. Water, dust, or leaves would obscure the tar, and when animals would wander into the pit they would become trapped. The struggle to get out of the tar would attract predators, which could also get trapped in the tar and eventually die. The remains of these animals would then be enveloped in the tar, which does a remarkable job at preserving the bones.
While the tar pits were known about as early as the 1780’s it wasn’t until 1875 when William Denton, a professor at Wellesley College, visited the Hancock family’s property at Rancho La Brea and identified a piece of bone as a tooth from a saber-toothed cat that the remains from the tar pits were identified as belonging to a species that wasn’t just a typical modern animal. Despite this it wasn’t until 1901 when geologist William W. Orcutt, who was checking out prospects for oil production on the land, noticed a piece of armored hide from an extinct ground sloth in the asphalt that the real process of uncovering the La Brea area’s hidden fossils began.
Credit: Erin Podolak
Excavations of the area have been ongoing since the initial 1913-1915 project began. The 23 acre Hancock estate was officially turned over by the family to Los Angeles County for scientific exploration. The density and richness of the La Brea area is really remarkable. Several examples of prehistoric species have been uncovered at the La Brea Tar Pits including mammoths, mastadons, dire wolves, short-faced bears, ground sloths and saber-toothed cats. I think it can be easy to forget that until only 11,000 years ago North America had some tremendous large mammals that were all driven extinct. My favorites are definitely the short-faced bear and the ground sloth. By comparison, dinosaurs last roamed the Earth 65 million years ago. The last ice age dates to 0.3 million years ago. The Pleistocene, when many of the La Brea animals would have lived dates from 40,000 to 11,000 years ago. Several of the bones have been dated using Carbon-14 radiometric dating, which showed some of the oldest remains to be 46, 800 years old.
Despite all of the fossils that have been recovered from the area, the tar pits still continue to give up more. According to the Page Museum’s website since 1906 more than one million bones have been recovered representing over 231 species of vertebrates in addition to 159 species of plants and 234 invertebrates. An estimate of the size of the Page Museum’s collection is at about three million items. Three million. Excavations are still going on today at the La Brea Tar Pits with Project 23, a series of 23 crates of samples from the pits that were uncovered when the neighboring Los Angeles County Museum of Art excavated the area to build an underground parking lot.
ground sloth. Or at least, that is how I felt.
What I loved about the La Brea Tar Pits was the ability to ignite a sense of imagination. I thought it was great to try to visualize what the area would have looked like some 40,000 years ago. Trying to imagine an animal like a mastodon just wandering by you as you watch tar bubbling up to the surface of the lake pit definitely peaked my sense of wonder at the world. If you find yourself in the Los Angeles area, I definitely recommend the La Brea Tar Pits as a must see for kids and adults. The museum is fun and informative and the grounds that you can walk around and peer into the pits are definitely interesting to see. Really, who wouldn’t want the chance to ride a ground sloth?
New Job: The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
After an incredibly crazy month of traveling, interviewing, and moving I have officially started my new full time job at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. I announced on Twitter a few weeks ago that I accepted a position with DFCI as a science writer for donor relations, but I realized I never really gave my blog readers any background on what I’ll be doing. After all my whining and pontificating about growing up and joining the work force, it wouldn’t be right to not explain what my new job is all about.
As a science writer for donor relations my role is to research, gather information, and interview PI’s about research projects (mostly pre-clinical and clinical) on specific beats that I’ve been assigned. The beats are all specific subdivisions regarding research at DFCI, it could be a specific group of cancers like women’s cancers, a particular research group or institute or a particular program or approach to looking for treatments. DFCI is one of the oldest and most accomplished cancer research institutes in the United States with a serious commitment to both research and patient care.
Once I’m up to speed about what has been going on with a particular beat I write up a narrative report about all of the cool things they have accomplished in the last year. That report is given to donors to showcase the work that DFCI researchers are able to accomplish with the funding that the donors give to the institute. I’m just starting to get into my first project, but I’m really excited. I’m going to get to interview amazing researchers, and get to learn more about really interesting approaches to finding treatments for cancer and related diseases. DFCI is using the most cutting edge technology and processes available to come up with new incredible ways to take down cancer cells, and I get to spend my days finding out all about it.
So, that is my new job in a nutshell. It required a move from New Jersey to Boston which has been an incredible, though tiring experience. For those who are interested DFCI has a fascinating (at least I think it is fascinating) history making breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer. DFCI was founded in 1947, as the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, by Dr. Sidney Farber who was looking for a way to treat childhood leukemia. In the late 40’s leukemia was an automatic death sentence. Farber was the first in the world to achieve temporary remission of acute lymphotrophic leukemia (the most common form) using drugs (and later combinations of drugs) as treatment.
The foundation expanded to include adults in 1969 and was renamed the Sidney Farber Cancer Center in 1979 in honor of its founder. The name was changed again in 1983 to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to reflect the long term support of the Charles A. Dana Foundation. I’m going to guess everyone is familiar with the term chemotherapy, yes? Chemotherapy was developed at DFCI. There have been many other breakthroughs achieved at DFCI over the years, I suggest taking a look at the milestones to get a better idea.
Another interesting bit of DFCI is the formation of the Jimmy Fund and the organization’s relationship with the Boston Red Sox. DFCI was really one of the first cancer research organizations to successfully use public fundraising and awareness campaigns. A radio program in 1948 featuring “Jimmy” a childhood leukemia patient being visited by members of the Boston Braves baseball team prompted a huge influx of donations and the construction of the Jimmy Fund building on what is now DFCI’s main campus in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. In 1953 the Boston Red Sox named the Jimmy Fund their official charity after the Braves left the city, which is a relationship that continues nearly 60 years later.
That is just some really basic information about my new job and DFCI in general. I really suggest taking a look at the DFCI website and the Jimmy Fund website if you are interested in learning more about the institute. I’m proud and honored to be working for such a great organization, and I can’t wait to see what comes next. Also watch this video, and feel the awesome.
Note: By NO means am I an authority on cancer research or treatments of any kind. I am NOT a medical doctor, and am not qualified to answer any medical questions you may have. If you would like to talk to someone at DFCI, you can call the institute at 866-408-3324.
Book Review: The Perfect Storm
I have been told by many teachers and writers more experienced than I, that one of the best ways to create good writing is to read good writing. This is a lesson I find easy to embrace considering I love to read. One of the first classes I took at UW-Madison was Deborah Blum’s literary nonfiction course, in which I spent the semester enveloped in the work of some great narrative nonfiction writers. One of those writers was Sebastian Junger, whose 2010 book War I’ve written about previously and recommend.
When I discover a writer that I enjoy I try to go back and read their other work. I’ve done this with Dave Eggers reading Zeitoun, What Is The What, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I decided to give another of Junger’s pieces a shot and added The Perfect Storm to my Summer reading list. The Perfect Storm was published in 1997, and is the book that made Junger famous. It pieces together the last days of the swordfishing boat the Andrea Gail, which disappeared during a 1991 storm off the coast of Nova Scotia with all six crew members on board. I don’t believe in spoilers more than two decades after a story breaks, so I’ll go ahead and tell you that apart from some fuel tanks and some debris the boat has never been found, and its crew drowned.
When The Perfect Storm was released Junger was called the next Hemingway. I certainly am not enough of an authority on Hemingway to weigh in about whether that is an apt comparison but I can say that Junger is masterful in the way he tells the story of the Andrea Gail. Communications on the boat were suspended in its final hours, so there is no definitive record of what happened. The last communication from the boat was on the evening of October 28, 1991. After that, what happened to the boat and her crew is open to interpretation. But interpret, Junger does. Based on research on the storm and weather patterns, about the Andrea Gail and how she was built, about swordfishing and what an experienced Captain like the Andrea Gail’s Billy Tyne would do when faced with the weather conditions Junger pieces together a likely scenario for what the Andrea Gail and her crew went through in that storm.
As a work of nonfiction that tells a story where no one knows for sure what happened, I think The Perfect Storm really works. Junger is honest with the readers that the only way to try to understand what happened to the ship is to understand everything else about the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. He achieves this with an amount of elegance and grace that does justice to the tragedy that unfolded while still presenting hard facts along with probable outcomes as evidence. I found the recreation of what it is like to be on a sinking ship, knowing you are going to drown to be particularly poignant.
“They’re in absolute darkness, under a landslide of tools and gear, the water rising up the companionway and the roar of the waves probably very muted through the hull. If the water takes long enough, they might attempt to escape on a lungful of air- down the companionway, along the hall, through the aft door and out from under the boat – but they don’t make it. It’s too far, they die trying. Or the water comes up so hard and fast that they can’t even think. They’re up to their waists and then their chests and then their chins and then there’s no air at all. Just what’s in their lungs, a minute’s worth or so.”
I think that what makes Junger’s recreation so plausible and acceptable is that he presents options, while still writing with definitive language. I think the book is honest, and raw and that is what makes it work. You can also tell that Junger really did his homework and talked to so many people and read so much about what it is like to be on a boat that he is able to explain the different scenarios. The fact that the scenarios all end up with the same outcome also adds an element of strength to Junger’s recreations. He states it so plainly that it gave me chills, “Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are dead.”
I recommend The Perfect Storm to anyone. The technical aspects of boat design and mechanics coupled with weather patterns and the physics of how together they affect a boat at sea are so well interspersed with narrative that the story holds your attention the entire way through. I thought the book was easy to get into and handle, while still being able to draw you back over and over if you need to put it down or are reading while traveling. I felt like I learned the basics about fishing, boats, weather, rescue protocol, the physics of the ocean, and the social side of fishing life. There is so much information it opens up a different world for readers, which I think makes it really worth your time.
It is also worth noting that The Perfect Storm was made into a film in 2000 starring George Clooney as Billy Tyne and Mark Wahlburg as Bobby Shatford. I haven’t seen it, and thus have no recommendation to give but from the trailer it looks like some cinematic liberties were taken with the story while still making an interesting film. I’ll be putting it on my ever-growing list of things to see when I have more time.
How Endangered Is Endangered Enough?
Do you care that a rare type of freshwater mussel has been nearly wiped out? Unless you are like me in the throes of Summer and I am still looking-for-a-job-limbo, I doubt you have the time to give more than a moment of attention to the freshwater pearl mussels in Cumbria in the United Kingdom…if that. In my daily perusing of the BBC I saw this article, Rare mussels ‘almost’ wiped out and I couldn’t help but think A) how in danger is in danger enough to warrant media coverage and B) does covering close calls for endangered species result in ‘boy who cried wolf’ response from the public?
In summary, the article is about a massive die-off of freshwater peal mussels (Margaritifera margaritifera) which are a type of mollusk. The BBC reported that 80,000 of the mussels were lost in a single event out of a total estimated population of 12 million in England and Scotland. It was speculated that the event was caused by a loss of outflow from a lake that caused water temperature to go up and oxygen levels to go down. According to the BBC’s article the loss is significant because it happened in an individual incident and because the freshwater pearl mussel is listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as one what the BBC called the most endangered species.I was struck by the term “most endangered” because endangered is in itself a classification. I’ve written about IUCN red list classifications before, but I went back to their website to check how they define the status of a species. The IUCN has nine classifications for a species, they are:
- Extinct
- Extinct in the Wild
- Critically Endangered
- Endangered
- Vulnerable
- Near Threatened
- Least Concern
- Data Deficient
- Not Evaluated
I can’t help but wonder, how much nuance is too much nuance? I think it is very important to provide context and evidence when doing something like evaluating the state of a species. As science writers, we need to be specific because it helps avoid confusion or misrepresentation. I think the classifications are good because they help people determine how a species is doing and what should be of most concern. However, is it possible that by covering the shift of a species from level to level, or a mostly-bad-but-there-are-still-some-that-are-doing-okay-so-all-is-not-lost-event we are causing the public to care less? How many people read the BBC’s article and thought, “oh no, not the freshwater pearl mussel!”
But is lack of love for the freshwater pearl mussel really a reflection of uninteresting media coverage or just the lack of sexiness of the mollusk? Would the giant panda cause a bigger stir, just because it is a giant panda? Probably. Though theoretically all species are important, and seeing one in peril is always worrisome. While you can definitely argue that species like this and the problems they face don’t get nearly enough media attention and thus the coverage that it does get is a solid positive, I can’t help but wonder if people start to get jaded when they see stories like this. Personally, I thought the article in the BBC was interesting. I learned about a species that I wasn’t familiar with and problems that it and other species face. I think it was worth the time and worth the coverage, I just don’t think that opinion is going to land me in the majority.
So then is this a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation? Perhaps it is. I think the argument could be made on both sides. Covering an event that is important to a specific species, even when it does not cause it to become endangered or extinct can muddy the waters so to speak and make readers exasperated with stories that don’t seem pertinent in the grand scheme of things. Covering an event that is important to a specific species can also provide the public with information that is necessary to helping that species survive and can help them learn something interesting in the process. I think any story about species conservation walks a fine line between being appealing and entertaining while still being relevant and interesting.
What do you think, is the freshwater pearl mollusk worth covering? Would you cover it in print or only online? Does having an online platform make you more likely to cover it because it costs you less to do so? Do you think you can make the public jaded with stories that are interesting to science lovers but perhaps not to the general non-science minded public? Would that affect your choice to cover the species? Lots of questions and things to think about. If you’ve got some thoughts on the matter I’d love to hear them so leave them in the comments!