“If the average Joe or Sophie doesn’t know the name of the closest star (the sun), or whether tomatoes have genes (they do), or why your hand can’t go through a tabletop (because the electrons in each repel each other), what difference does it make?”
 

“Hey, the general pubic is pretty stupid (I’m not), and they don’t know anything about science (but I do), so aren’t you glad that I’m going (to lower myself) to explain it to you?”
 

“Should we show this letter to the president? Oh, yes, absolutely, the president must see this at once! The advisers burst into the suitable cellularly shaped oval office to find the president, as ever, surrounded on all sides—by bodyguards, legislators, lobbyists, dignitaries, indignitaries, the presidential physician, the presidential astrologer/personal trainer/hairstylist, and Ed Tatum from Omaha, Nebraska who wandered in while looking for the bathroom.”
 

I somehow ended up on the roof while looking for Caty Pilachowski’s office. Swain West, the building that houses both the physics and astronomy departments, is a bizarre labyrinth of offices and labs. Additions over the years have been strangely illogical (for example, you can only get to parts of the third floor from specific staircases), and a person can end up in some weird places if they don’t pay attention.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Photo by 2MASS=Two Micron All Sky Survey.

When the universe was born, it only contained the lightest elements: hydrogen, helium, and maybe a little lithium. But as time went on, these elements smacked into each other inside stars and formed different elements. This is called fusion, since the nuclei of the elements fuse together.

But because their insides only reach a certain temperature, lower mass stars can only make new elements up to the weight of about aluminum. To make elements heavier than that, the star has to be really hot. Like supernova hot.

A supernova is when a star blows up. As you might be able to imagine, an exploding star is a pretty big reaction, and the heaviest metals can be formed. These then get flung all over the place, where they can then be incorporated into newly forming stars.

So by measuring how much and what kind of metals are in a star, Pilachowski can tell their relative age. Younger stars would have more metal atoms than older stars.

And by using a really big telescope to look at the outer layer of the star, the metals can be identified by the lines of color they absorb. This is called a line spectra, and each element has one all its own. Kind of like a chemical signature.

Hearken back to high school chemistry. You remember that all elements have a specific number of electrons, right? And that these electrons move in discrete paths called orbits. Imagine the electrons as driving around in little cars, on little tracks. The only way they can move is to jump into another car, on its own, different track. And all of these tracks are a known distance away from each other.

The Pleiades open cluster. Photo by NASA/ESA/AURA/CalTech.

From this information, Pilachowski can learn about the origins of our galaxy: which stars are young, which ones are old. Which ones have had heavy metals flung at them by exploding stars.

Okay, so there’s no denying the neato factor in this type of research. But why does she do it?

“I really like stars,” she said, a radiant smile breaking through the cool scientist demeanor. “I’ve always liked stars.”

* * * * *

After I left Caty’s office, I jumped across the hall to talk to her research group.

Crowded into a closet-sized room (well, a large closet) were three people and six computers. As I walked in, the person in the middle unfolded his long frame to greet me.

“I’m Christian,” he said, shaking my hand.

Christian Johnson is one of the three senior graduate students in Pilachowksi’s lab, and graciously allowed me to tag along with him for a bit. He is tall and blond, with the somewhat peaked look of someone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer.

The other two senior members of the lab, Tala Monroe and Heather Jacobson, said hello and smiled at me as I pulled up a chair behind Johnson’s massive black one. And then he started telling me about his research. Overall, it took about an hour, but here’s the gist:

Johnson studies the chemical evolution in the globular cluster Omega Centauri, the largest star cluster in the galaxy. Compared to the Sun (and they compare everything to the Sun), globular clusters are old folks—ten to twelve billion years old. The stars Johnson studies are also larger in size than the Sun, about 50-100 times the radius. But at the same time, they’re smaller in mass, only about 80% of the Sun.

NGC 5139: Omega Centauri, the largest globular star cluster in the Milky Way. Photo by Martin Pugh.

Within Omega Centauri, Johnson tells me, he looks at red giants. These are low mass stars, less massive than the sun, but more than two times as old. They’re called red giants because they’re both red, and well, giant. Red giants are used because they are bright and can see them from much farther away.

A reason why they like these clusters is that they know how far away they are, and they know how bright they are. That’s important for making sense out of the data they collect.

Specifically, this globular cluster is about 5 kiloparsecs away.

“I suppose you want that in light years,” he says.

I nod. Parsecs? That’s from Star Wars, right?

It’s about 20,000 light years.

I ask him if he thinks the stars he’s looking at are still there. I mean, the light left them 20,0000 years ago! Anything could have happened since then.

But he seems less than impressed.

“Oh sure,” he says.

To collect this light, created so long ago, Johnson needs a really big telescope.

Pilachowski had told me that most of their collection gets done at either the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tuscon Arizona, or the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory near Santiago, Chile. Johnson collects his data at this site, in the Andes Mountains.

The Blanco 4 meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. This is the telescope Johnson uses to collect his data. Photo by Tala Monroe.

They only get a couple of nights there, and they have to stay up all night to collect their data. It’s pretty remote, Johnson said. The telescope is high up on a mountain. They sleep, during the day, at the little compound about two miles away. The site provides cars for them to travel back and forth.

“And of course you can’t turn on the headlights,” Jacobson chimes in.

This confused me for a second. Then I got it.

“Oh,” I say. “Yeah, of course.”

Of course they can’t turn on the headlights. Why go all the way to a completely remote area in the middle of the Andes Mountains, where there’s no light pollution or people around at all, only to screw up your data collection by turning on your headlights?

“So how do you see?” I ask.

You kind of don’t.

“You have to drive at about two miles an hour, hoping you don’t go off the road,” Heather tells me.

“And the dirt roads are really steep and winding. And there aren’t any guardrails,” Johnson says.

“But they do give you flashlights,” Jacobson says.

Yeah, good thing.

They get about three to six nights per semester, or six to ten nights per year to collect their data. And then the rest of the year, they study what they’ve collected.

The data that Johnson collects is about the amount of metals in the red giants of Omega Centuri. He looks at the line spectra of a lot of different metals, but uses iron as an indicator of the composition of the metals in the star. Plus it has several lines, so it’s easy to pick out.

Once he locates his lines, he measures how big they are, specifically their depth and width. This tells him how many atoms of each element are in the star. He plots this information for the many thousands of lines.

This takes…a while. To get meaningful data, Johnson first has to clean up a bit, doing things like converting units and other housekeeping like that. This can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Then he gets down to looking at the lines themselves. There are around 1000 stars, and about 30-50 lines per star. So there are tens of thousands of lines total. Each star takes about five to ten minutes to work on, so you can do the math there.

Johnson inside the focus of the Blanco 4 meter telescope. Photo by Tala Monroe.

Once he gets all this data worked out, he compares it to the Sun. This gives the relative chemical composition of the star, which in turn tell Johnson what’s going on, evolution wise, in that little section of the galaxy.

Johnson has been looking at line spectra of about 1000 giants in his global cluster, which is the largest detailed study for a single cluster so far. There are four or five known populations with different metal contents for him to use as a kind of staring point. But what he’s trying to figure out is how exactly chemical evolution happens—if more supernovas have gone off, and polluted stars with heavy metals, and which stars produce certain elements.

So all this he figures out while sitting in front of his computer, day after day. But the big picture?

Johnson collects the light that left 20,000 years ago from something that’s 95,870,000,000,000,000 miles away with a really big telescope in Chile. Then he brings the enormous piles of data back here, and analyzes it over the course of many months. From this, he can extract details about the origins of our galaxy.

Give or take.

Friday, November 21^st, 2008. 10:02 am. Still Earth.

It’s group meeting time.

All academic labs in the entire universe have group meeting. It can mean different things for different groups, but in general it’s a time for the whole research group to come together and talk about their work. In the Pilachowski lab, it means that everyone assembles—Johnson, Monroe, Jacobson, Pilachowski, and Maria Cordero, a first year graduate student from Chile. They all talk about what they’ve done in the time since their last group meeting (Johnson says they’re a bit on the erratic side, with people winging off to remote telescope locations now and then).

Johnson, Monroe, and I get assembled in the conference room down the hall from their office. Desks are pushed together to form a makeshift table in the center, and the walls are covered with blackboards and whiteboards and pictures of galaxies.

Pilachowski breezes in a few minutes later, looking fresh but tired already.

“I have meetings at 9, 10, 11, 12, 3, and I teach at 1:20,” she tells us.

As chair of the astronomy department, she’s got a lot of administrative duties to deal with. So she gets right down to it and starts talking to Johnson about the proposal he’s just finished working on.

“I thought the proposal surprisingly turned out well,” she said.

It’s a joint proposal, to submit to the National Science Foundation (NSF). Researchers in academic environments all have to apply for funding through either public or private sources. The NSF is one of the big ones, but also one that’s been hit by budget cuts in the last few years.

It’s a collaborative proposal with scientists at UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and Ohio State, and Pilachowski thinks they have a good chace of getting it funded.

“It’s a pretty strong scientific group,” she said.

It would be the first big comprehensive look at the bulge, the thicker part in the center of the galaxy, she tells me. Pilachowski thinks their chances of funding are about 50/50.

“You might have a post-doc,” she says to Johnson.

While Johnson is only a fourth-year grad student, he thinks he’ll finish his dissertation in about a year. That makes him a bit of an overachiever, since it normally takes astronomy students six to seven years to finish up. But that also makes him mindful of what he’s going to do next. Johnson ultimately wants to go into academia, to be a professor. But he needs to do some post-doctoral research first. And if this grant goes through, he’ll get one, because a salary for him is written into it.

From here they plunge into Johnson’s latest data. He hands her a graph, of some of his data plotted against some data from another research group on the same type of system.

Pilachowski looks over her glasses and tries to explain this project to me.

A compilation image of the Keplers supernova. Photo by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

“We’re trying to figure out where the elements are made,” she says. “So we’re trying to find the previous generation of stars.”

Sodium and aluminum are produced mostly in explosive reactions, she says. These tend to have really high temperatures.

“Around 200 million,” she says.

I ask for the units.

“Doesn’t matter,” she quickly answers.

Ah. Good point.

Generally, temperatures are reported in Kelvin, which is degrees Celsius plus 273.15. But when something is 200 million degrees, difference like 273 means pretty much zip.

But once those heavier elements like sodium and aluminum are formed, she goes on, other elements can formed through little side reactions.

“There are lots of different things going on,” she says. “It makes it complicated to untangle."

She goes back to the graph in front of her, and notices that one set is a lot different than the others. Pilachowski thinks it maybe formed in different part of cluster, but Johnson shrugs. She says she’ll look at it in more in detail later, then asks what else he’s got.

“I’ve been comparing my data to previous studies, and working on the paper,” he says.

The goal of research groups, besides getting grants funded, is to publish their results in academic journals. Johnson’s had four published so far, three of which he’s been the first author on (which means he’s done the majority of the work).

“I should have everything but the conclusion by next week,” he continues.

“Fantastic,” Pilachowski says. Then she turns to Monroe.

Monroe talks for awhile about changing some of the parameters for working up her data, how it seems to be giving her somewhat better numbers. Then Jacobson talks about some of the work she did a couple of years ago, how she’s found some interesting stuff. Then the conversation moves around to the trip back to the telescope in Arizona that she’s getting ready to leave on, to collect more data for this project.

Time exposure of the Kitt Peak National Observatory. Photo by NOAO/AURA/NSF.

At this, Pilachowski puts her head in her hands.

Jacobson looks slightly alarmed.

“Will it be tricky to combine new data with the old data?” she asks.

“What we saw when we were there last week was scary,” Pilachowski says, her voice muffled by her hands.

She and Monroe were just down there on a collecting run just a few days before.

“The lens is in the wrong position, and it’ll have to be remachined,” she says. “It sounds like a problem we’ll have to deal with for awhile.”

The settings for the telescope have been changed since Jacobson collected her last set of data. This is bad, because if she sees some kind of difference in the new data, she won’t know if it’s a real difference, or if it’s different because her parameters were different.

“My guess is your resolution’s going to suck, which is not good news,” Pilachowski says.

Jacobson is supposed to leave in two weeks. Pilachowski suggests that Jacobson might have to reconsider what she’s going to try to observe, or have alternate plan. She’s annoyed that they made changes right before Jacobson’s last run, because it’s the last time she needed to get data at the same parameters.

“I wish that they’d waited just a few weeks,” she says. “I have a right to be totally totally pissed. I got no official word about it.”

And then Pilachowski looks at her watch, and sees it’s almost time for her next meeting. Off she goes, and the group trickles back to their office.

* * * * *

Saturday, November 21^st, 2008. 1:13 pm. Somewhere in space, looking down on earth. At least that’s where we’re supposed to be in our imaginations.

I’m late, so I try to slip discreetly into one of the teaching labs in Swain West, breathless and hot in my coat and hat. The room is pretty full. All around the perimeter are adults, looking amused/interested at the circle of about eighteen small girls, all wearing matching shirts or brown sashes.

Tala Monroe stands in the midst of the short people. She smiles down at the mass of assembled Brownies, showing deep dimples.

“So if we’re laying on our backs, looking straight upwards, and the sun is directly overhead, what time of day is it?” she asks.

The room gets quiet as the group of six and seven-year-olds stop to think.

“Nightime?” offers one little girl in a pink shirt and gold-rimmed glasses.

“No,” Monroe says. “Try again.”

“Day?” says another girl, a black newsboy cap perched jauntily on her head.

“What time of day?” Monroe asks.

“Noon!” someone shouts.

“Right!” Monroe says. “When the sun is directly over our heads, it’s noon.”

Part of being an astronomy graduate student at IU is doing outreach. Today, several troops of Brownies, about 80 girls in total, have come from all around South-Central Indiana for a science day. There are several rooms set up with activities in different disciplines. We’re, obviously, in the astronomy room. Monroe has the girls turn to their left. They all stick hands with a ‘W’ written on them into the center of the circle. The hand with ‘E’ on it points out.

“What time of day is it now?” she asks.

“Sunset!” someone shouts.

“Right!” Monroe answers.

Monroe is the outreach coordinator for this semester, so she’s the one leading the activity, The Reason for Seasons. She has the girls all pretending to be little earths, with Jacobson in the middle of the circle, holding a yellow ball on her head. (That’s the sun, if you didn’t get it.)

They go the rest of the way through their teeny rotations, and end up back at noon again.

“We’ve just completed a full day,” Monroe says. “How long did that take?”

The axial tilt of the earth in relation to rotation axis and the plane of orbit. Image copyright Dennis Nilsson.

“Twenty-four hours!” says a girl in a green striped sweatshirt.

Johnson watches from the back of the room, near the sign that says “Spring Equinox” taped up to the wall. The “Autumn Equinox” sign is on the wall behind Pilachowski’s head, on the opposite side of the room. Summer and Winter Solstice signs are to the right and left of Johnson, respectively. Another sign with the word “Polaris” and a drawing of a big yellow star, is above the winter sign, just below a big clock.

The girls pirouette like teeny planetary ballerinas, going through their 24 hour day. Then Monroe tells them about the orbit of the earth.

“How many days are in a year?” she asks.

A girl in a purple shirt puts up her hand.

“About 365 and one-third,” she says.

“Um, right!” Monroe says, slightly surprised. “So we’re going to go through our orbits, while rotating at the same time.”

They start off on their course, going slightly astray as Monroe laughs helps them in the right direction.

There is much giggling. They get to their original spots, then stop.

“It’s pretty amazing what the earth is doing when we’re not paying attention,” she says, and many Brownies nod.

But we’re missing something, she says. She reaches behind her and grabs a globe.

“It’s not straight up and down, is it?” Monroe asks.

Nope, the girls say. It’s tilted. Monroe tells them that the earth is always pointing at Polaris, the north star. She has the girls hold their hands above their heads, then lean over and point at Polaris. Now twirl, she says.

They do it, again with much smiling and giggling.

“Now we’re going to rotate, while pointing at Polaris,” Monroe says. “Think you can do it?”

“Yeah!” they yell.

What happens next looks like a traffic pile-up, but cuter. They’re all running into each other, going off course, and practically falling over. Once get back to their starting positions, they calm down again.

“The tilt is the reason for the seasons!” Monroe says.

She leans over, near the Winter Equinox sign.

“My top part gets less sunlight than my bottom part,” she says, which makes the days shorter and the air colder.

She goes to each station in turn, demonstrating the amount of sunlight that falls on the upper and lower half of her body.

The Brownies nod.

“That makes sense,” says a small blond girl.

After doing another short activity at the lab tables, the Brownies file out to go to their next room.

Johnson looks a bit overwhelmed.

“Look inside yourself, and find your inner second-grader,” says another grad student, who was working at the next table.

“I don’t know if I was a normal second-grader,” Johnson answers.

But then he doesn’t have a chance to say much more, as the next group is coming in.

Over the course of the day, they’ll do this six more times. Just part of their job, as astronomy students. That and figuring out the origins of the galaxy.

All in a day’s work.

She gets it.

Jyllian Kemsley, writer and associate editor of Chemical and Engineering News, the magazine for the American Chemical Society, understands what it’s really like to be scientist. She knows the agony of data that doesn’t make sense, the staying up all night to do just one more experiment, and that smoothbeautiful click when it comes together.

That’s because she actually is a scientist.

Kemsley got her PhD in bioinorganic chemistry from Stanford University in 2003. There she overlapped slightly with my research adviser, who did post-doctoral work in the same lab. She asked about him as we sat down for an interview in the late October sunlight of Palo Alto.

I whined that he had asked me to schlep eight pounds of Peet’s coffee back to Indiana, and she laughed.

“Nice to know he hasn’t changed,” she said.

Kemsley’s familiarity with graduate student/research adviser dynamic, and the goings on in science labs in general, is something that’s invaluable to her as a science writer. She earned a certificate in the subject from the U.C. Santa Cruz program, doing much of the coursework while she was writing her dissertation.

Since then, Kemsley has freelanced for several publications, including the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Lux Research, and Nanotech Report. She’s also the mom of three kids, and works partly from her home in the Bay Area. We talked about what it’s like to be both a scientist and a science writer.

How is science writing different than working in a chemistry lab?

You’re obviously not playing with chemicals anymore. What I do is not as deeply focused on one thing. But I have to understand a subject to be able to write to it. My level of understanding definitely varies if I’m writing three paragraphs or three pages, because you can’t tell someone else about something unless you understand it. I’m hearing about other people’s work, I’m not the one in the lab doing the experiments. What I hear is what it took someone else several years to pull together. So I think I am getting a higher level view than a person working in a lab.

Is the thought process any different?

I don’t think it is, because you still have to think very critically. You still have to say, does this make sense? But I’m asking why rather than devising an experiment to figure out why. To do a good job with a story I can’t just write down what someone says to me. I have to think critically about it, and if there are any problems, I have to think about who are the best people are to provide insight into the work.

A laser experiment in Kemsley’s story on the validity of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, a tenet in physical chemistry. Image from Chemical and Engineering News, photo by Etienne Garand.

Why did you decide to go into science writing?

I had worked for Merck before I went to graduate school, and had done an internship with a biotech company while I was in grad school. And I knew I didn’t want to go into industry. Academia had lost its allure.

I discovered science writing by accident, despite the fact that I got Chemical & Engineering News and Science on my desk every week. It had never occurred to me to question who writes the news stuff in there. A friend doing the American Association of Advancement of ScienceMass Media Fellowship mentioned in passing that she had heard about these training courses in science writing. And I spent the next two hours on the web looking up these programs. I had been thinking I’d find a post-doctoral research position to give myself more time, then realized I’d spent more time looking for science writing programs than looking for a post-doc. So I sat back and said, “Huh. What does this tell me?”

With a PhD already, doing a science writing program that was also a master’s degree was very unappealing. Doing more science classes wasn’t going to get me anymore. And I lucked out that I was in the Bay Area, Santa Cruz was in my backyard. It was the best program for my skill set. It’s basically a one year boot camp in reporting and writing. And I got in.

Has having a PhD helped you or hindered you, as a writer?

I think for what I do, it has helped me. It gives me credibility with our sources. But when I was a freelancer, I didn’t necessarily advertise it. If I were freelancing, depending on the publication, I probably wouldn’t advertise the PhD, because the general assumption is that PhD scientists can’t write. But I think it can be effective for gaining credibility, particularly for academic scientists. A lot of sources, even for Chemical & Engineering News, will say, “And what’s your background?” I’ll tell them I have a PhD in chemistry, and they’ll say, “Okay, then I don’t have to explain x, y, and z to you.”

Scientists are often gun-shy in talking to reporters because they are, I think, to some degree, justifiably concerned that things are going to get twisted and distorted. And I think it’s even different having been a graduate student because they know you understand the culture, that you understand what it takes experimentally and what the limitations can be in terms of drawing conclusions from data. And this is not to say that good science reporters can’t do that without the PhD; they certainly can. But I think it does give some scientists a comfort level with me that they might not have otherwise.

An ancient Mayan sculpture, from Kemsley’s story on the chemistry of the dye Mayan Blue. Image from Chemical and Engineering News, photo by the Field Museum.

You’re a product of the Santa Cruz writer’s program. You’ve also had an internship at Chemical & Engineering News. Which do you think has taught you more about being a science writer?

I’d have to say the science writing program. I was actually surprised when I did the internship at Chemical & Engineering News how much easier reporting and writing was in practice than it was for class. We got edited so intensely and so closely in the writing program, whereas most of my stuff got in the magazine without a whole lot of editing. The other thing that was so hard for me at Santa Cruz was that we were always writing for a general audience, if I remember correctly at an 8th grade level. And that’s a very difficult audience for me to write for. I do much, much better when my audience is at a higher education level, particularly science for scientists. So writing for Chemical & Engineering News is inherently easier for me than for writing for a general audience.

What is the best experience that you’ve ever had as a science writer?

Honestly, I still think it’s seeing my stuff in print. There’s still, and I suspect there always will be, this real feeling of accomplishment when I get the magazine and I see the story. This is having seen the proofs; there’s something else about seeing the glossy pages. Often by the time I file a story, I pretty much hate it. But when I read it on page in the magazine, it always seems so much better than it did when I last saw it.


What’s the experience that has taught you the most?

There was a story I did when I was interning for Chemical & Engineering News, that was about a pair of papers that had come out in the Journal for the American Chemical Society. One of the things that Chemical & Engineering News routinely does is send either parts of stories or entire stories back to our sources, depending on the situation. This is to ensure that we get the science correct, and make sure there are no misunderstandings. We have some standard text that we send along with that, which is basically please check for scientific accuracy, while I’m happy to correct any errors, and we’ll consider and other suggestions you may have, the final decision on magazine content are up to the editorial staff of the magazine.

In this case, I presented the work, and there were three main criticism of it. I had three different sources going into each of these points. They all said it’s really interesting work, but here’s where I see the potential flaws of it. To these three outside sources, I sent their parts back to them. But I chose to send the entire story back to the principal researcher. And he was angry. Because he felt that he had dealt with those criticisms in the papers, they were not something I should be raising in the story. I got back this six-page letter; he had commented on just about every sentence of the story.

A figure from Kemsley’s story on the components of human breast milk. Image from Chemical and Engineering News.

At that point, I wasn’t going to change the story. I felt that what I was doing was legitmate, and my editors agreed. So I wrote back and said, I understand that you think you dealt with these in the papers, but they’re still valid criticisms of the work, and they’re fair to include. At that point he went to my boss, my editor, with the same thing, and Ron (my editor) backed me up. But it was still very, very stressful.

And what was really interesting, was when the story came out, he wrote back and said what a great story it was. And I hadn’t changed anything.

The conclusion afterward was that really he was just trying to bully me. And when he realized he couldn’t do that, he decided that it was pretty good after all. So it was a good lesson in not letting myself be bullied. I do always try to take into consideration source comments, even when it’s not correcting a mistake. But there are ones who will take it too far and you need to be ready to stand up to that. And it’s also nice to have editors who will stand up to that, too.


How did you get your job at Chemical & Engineering News?

They pretty much dropped it in my lap. I had interned with them, and I’d freelanced with them. The former assistant managing editor for the Science and Technology department retired a year before in September, and the person who was going to be promoted into his job called me in August and said, “Well Ron’s retiring in September, do you want a staff job?” And I did not think that was coming.

When I had interned with them, there were a couple of positions that had opened up right when I was finishing, and the idea had been floated to hire me into one of those. But they were insistent that I be in Washington D.C. There was just no way around that, and I didn’t think it had changed.

So my first response to the editor when she called was, “You realize that I’m not willing to relocate, right?” And she said “Yeah, that’s fine.” But I wasn’t entirely ready to go back to work full time, I was still working part time at that point. My daughter, Laryn, was turning three and my twin boys were turning one. So I originally told her, no I don’t think I can do this.

After I got off the phone with her I called my husband, and said “You’re not going to believe what just happened.” He and I talked it through, and decided that maybe we could make it work. So I called Amanda back 45 minutes later and said, “Um, can we start that conversation over again?” Fortunately, she was just fine with that.


Do you have any advice for an aspiring science writer?

If you really think it’s what you want to do, I say go for it. I love what I do, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s very interesting. Chemical & Engineering News is not territorial; although we have rough beats, we’re pretty much free to work on what interests us. So in the past year, I’ve written about purifying sewage for drinking water, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in physical chemistry, the television show “Breaking Bad,” and a graduate student at UC Merced who’s agreed to a plea deal for stealing chemicals and equipment from the university for making methamphetamine. So, there’s not a lot there to get bored with. At this point, I arguably have the most eclectic story list at Chemical & Engineering News. But my editors have told me that they appreciate that, and I appreciate the freedom to work on whatever I want. There’s no shortage of things for us to write about.