The Odds that I Will Freelance for “Book of Odds” are 1 in 1.

Over the summer, several of us were approached by a start-up Web company. They had spent years collecting statistics on the probabilities that various things will happen to a person during their lifetime — stuff like getting struck by lightning, being diagnosed with breast cancer, or getting eaten by a bear (okay, I made that last one up, but it’ll probably make it in there one day) — and wanted some science writers to turn the numbers into compelling articles, interpret them fairly, and put them in context.

Now that the site has been soft-launched, I can point you to Book of Odds.

I’ve contributed seven articles so far, with two more in the pipeline, and hopefully more to come. Though so far only three seem to be posted:

Sex and the Single STD Test (I feel compelled to point out that the titles are not always mine.)

We All Fall Down

Men Are Compulsive Shoppers Too

Oddly enough (ha, a pun), in initially expressing my interest areas I’ve become one of the site’s only gender and sexuality writers, so half my pieces are about things like STDs and sex-and-marriage and sex-on-the-first-date and so forth. And then, because stats often come in pairs, split between men and women, my analysis turns to why there might be a gender split and whether it’s fair. So I end up coming across as a sex-obsessed feminist….

Regardless, my favorite non-sex-related, non-feminist article may be one by my former classmate, MacGregor Campbell: Sharks or Vending Machines: Which Is Deadlier? and its analytic companion, Behind the Numbers. It’s a good example of what the site is trying to do. With bonus wacky trivia!

Feedback, as always, is welcome.

New article in Technology Review

The conference was spectacular. More on that later.

For now, I am happy to report that I have a small article in the November/December issue of Technology Review: An Astounding Collection: MIT’s Science Fiction Treasure Trove. There is a great selection of photographs accompanying it, from the MIT Archives. Kids in cat-eye glasses and with carefully unkempt beards, from the 60s and 70s: nerds reveling in nerddom.

Away to Austin (NASW)

Tomorrow I am off to Austin for four days for the annual Science Writers conference, co-hosted by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW). There will be a trip to the Bat Cave and everything. (Okay, the Bat Bridge. But still.)

This will be my first time attending. A couple of my classmates went last year, but I decided to stay put and focus on school. I think it will be even more valuable now that I’m starting out in this new direction, looking to freelance and pick up any new tips on multimedia/social media. There is a “power pitch” session where you can speed-date with editors of various magazines and newspaper science sections. Like all conferences, it should also be an excellent opportunity to make new contacts and say hello to people I know. We’re having an MIT science writing alumni happy hour on Saturday, and there may be a chance to meet my fellow NASW Travel Fellows.

I haven’t been to Texas since I was five or six, when my mom took my sister and me to visit her brother and our cousins in San Antonio on a jaunt during my dad’s business trip to Los Angeles. I don’t remember much of it, but nearby Austin sounds like a vibrant city with a kickin’ music scene.

See you on the other side.

New video/podcast featurelet up

Although I have been neck-deep in new responsibilities as a science writer at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for three weeks now, a few remaining articles and multimedia features are still percolating through the review and posting system at NIGMS. This video/podcast featurelet went up today. It was orginally going to be a straight-text article, but since I recorded the phone interview and the pictures from the journal paper were so neat-looking, we turned it into this.

Graduation

Well, it’s official — we’ve been awarded our degrees and released back into the wild.

The night before, we organized our own class happy hour. With seven people, it wasn’t too tough to pull off. The next morning we had the traditional “old class, meet new class” brunch, since as a twelve-month program there’s no overlap. Then we had our own wining-and-dining graduation ceremony in the evening, with faculty, families and significant others. My sister even made it down from Montreal in the pouring rain.

5/7 of my class gathered for brunch (and another 1/7 behind the camera)...

...and everyone looking lovely at the ceremony.

Although the trip to Cambridge was a whirlwind with less than 48 hours in town, it was wonderful to see everyone again (and a few other friends, too). Since we’d finished our coursework and theses in May and many of us had left campus soon after, it felt more like a reunion than a graduation. But by the time the ceremony itself rolled around on Saturday night, talking with professors and hearing their mini-speeches as they called us up, there was nevertheless a sense of culmination, of commencement. Of having been trained, pushed, tested, and now set free, tasked to fulfill our potential as creators and purveyors of the highest-caliber science writing.

I want to live up to that. It’s why I left my previous job to go to school — to go to MIT in particular — and it’s what I want to do. What I am starting to do. What — I need to remind myself of this — I can do.

A little Nobel excitement

As you may have heard, the Nobel Prizes are being announced each morning this week. Because it only supports basic research, and because basic research-driven discoveries sometimes balloon into numerous unforeseen areas that may include widespread medical applications, the institute I work for (part-time now) often has grantees among the Nobel laureates. Actually, we’ve had at least one winner each year in the last 12 years.

With that track record, it’s not surprising that some administrators like to guess which grantees might be up for consideration come Nobel season, and that one lucky communications team member wakes up for the pre-dawn announcements of medicine/physiology and chemistry to find out whether the troops need to rally for media relations. This year was no exception — and all the preparation paid off, because it turned out we do or did support all three new laureates on Monday and all three again this morning.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the one who got up hours early, but I did get to take part in the hubbub. While colleagues hustled to draft the institute statements, blog posts, news releases and Tweets, field calls from newspapers and leave congratulatory and invitational messages on various other institutes’ and universities’ voicemails, I did video interviews with the institute director.
 
 
Monday’s prize in Physiology or Medicine was for the discovery of and subsequent research on telomeres — the caps on chromosomes that keep DNA strands from shortening every time a cell divides, and now famous for helping to regulate cellular and therefore organismal aging — and telomerase, the enzyme that makes them.

Aside from the time crunch and software issues, the interview and editing process went well. The resulting video, pared down from 20 minutes to less than two, is here: http://publications.nigms.nih.gov/multimedia/captions/BergNobel2009-captions.html
 
 
Today’s prize in Chemistry was for the decades-long work that went into discerning the structure of ribosomes — the huge agglomerations of RNA and proteins that translate genetic instructions into the proteins that do all the jobs in our bodies — down to each of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make them up.

This interview was neat because JB had to take a break in the middle to talk to the NY Times. Possibly with Dennis Overbye, since that’s who wrote the article that appeared afterwards. Wish I could have heard the other end of the conversation too, to pick up a couple more tricks of the trade. Anyway, afterwards, the editing process was smooooth as could be.

The video is here: http://publications.nigms.nih.gov/multimedia/captions/BergNobel2009_chem-captions.html

Pretty cool for a tiny camera, stack of magazines to prop it on, no microphone, and Windows MovieMaker without using any effects.
 
 
It was interesting and fun to be even moderately involved in the action, and to produce material on short deadlines, which isn’t usually required for my assignments in the department. I also enjoy seeing my interview subject get a little more comfortable with the process each time we sit down to talk. Different tips we learned at school definitely help, such as pre-interviewing or priming with questions before turning on the camera, and asking questions twice in a row to get pithier answers.

I’ve been getting better each time, too, at asking questions to get an emotional, anecdotal or meta response rather than technical or explanatory questions, picking follow-up questions to get to more interesting areas, and keeping an ear out for the golden quotes that become conclusions — and not ending the interviews until I have them.
 
 
It was also interesting to see the effort that went into pitching, pre-pitching, and reminding people outside the NIH that these award-winning studies were funded by someone. Especially since my background is not in science, before coming to the NIH for the summer I wasn’t thinking about this either. But science doesn’t happen in a vacuum — someone has to give a researcher money to support the staff and equipment. Someone has to sell that research and someone has to buy. It shapes what can be done. And one of the stories that came out of this year’s wins, and which is the driving philosophy behind this institute in particular — a story that’s increasingly important as adminstrations and industries press for immediately applicable work — is how important it is to fund work that’s just about wanting to know something. Because human knowledge is worthwhile in itself — and because you never know what each tiny, fundamental discovery will lead to.

Some recent work

It’s been a while since I’ve pointed to some of the work I’ve been doing. Here are a few articles, videos and podcasts — well, podcast, singular — that’ve been posted recently.

Today saw the launch of the website that accompanies a revamped version of the NIGMS publication, “The Chemistry of Health.” So some profiles I wrote earlier in the summer are live. I like these; they’re short, structured and peppy. The whole gallery is here – I wrote Combs, Freeze, Jamison, Lau*, LoGrasso, Rosenzweig, and Sorensen*, with Karypis on the way. My favorite profile may be the first one I wrote, and not just because you can call the man — superhero? — Dr. Freeze. I also made a pair of bare-bones videos to accompany LoGrasso’s profile that should be up soon.

*These two were based on preexisting profiles.

I wrote two more issues of the monthly “Biomedical Beat,” which saw us transform the “Cool Image” feature into a “Cool Video” one. August’s was a progression of still images, but this month’s had actual video clips and came out very cool, I think, for being as simply produced as it is. I loved using the clip of the cell straining forward like a little paramecium.

Continuing the multimedia trend, we tried a couple of experiments in the last few weeks with producing podcasts and short videos to accompany press packs while the research papers they discussed were still under embargo.

The first, a video for a Science article about the metabolism of an extremophile bacterium, came out all right. Not what I’d hoped for when I was given the assignment. Lesson learned: make sure you have compelling images, or at least images beyond the technical ones in the scientific paper, before you commit to making a video. But it went out in the press kit (national exposure, hurrah), the researcher’s institute posted it on its website, and one of our department advisors praised it, so that’s nice.

The second was a podcast for a Nature paper this week where a researcher studying ancient proteins found that evolution can only go forwards. NIGMS had featured the doc before in a few profiles and news briefs, so it was easy to contact him and arrange the telephone interview. We ended up with 20 minutes of material that got pared down to less than three — longer podcasts won’t hold anyone’s attention, really. The story got wide coverage, and again, the doc’s university included our podcast in its news release. I like how this turned out — a lot of the audio edits aren’t detectable — although I do wish some of the original ending had stayed in; I think it drops off a bit without warning in its final incarnation.

As always, I welcome your thoughts. Opinions on what works as well as constructive criticism on what doesn’t will help me produce better work.