A longstanding fan of science, I appreciate Natalie Angier’s attempts in The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (2007) to enliven the field for a lay audience. At times she even succeeds. Still, I wish her book had more of the sciences’ elegant structure and less of the fluff she so derisively—and maybe hypocritically—associates with the arts in her uncharacteristically curmudgeonly introduction.

Nevertheless, I admire Angier’s indefatigable fascination with her subject. The information here is good and, for the most part, accurate. When appropriate, Angier’s stories are vivifying, and Angier proves herself a skilled and energetic journalist. She has gone out of her way to find real people—i.e., scientists—to help her out with her explanations and to portray the human side of research. Her excitement is palpable. I sometimes wished she’d back off a bit, though. And for somebody as enamored with science as I am, that’s saying something.

Ironically, Angier seems to have little faith in science’s innate ability to captivate anyone except herself. She eschews diagrams and equations in favor of rhymes, puns, and misplaced jokes. Her (understandable) goal is to enlighten without miring the reader in too much mathspeak. But she discounts the possibility that mathematical or visual explication could help her readers form a more intuitive understanding than the written word alone.

In the end, Angier writes most about why her readers should care, perhaps to her detriment. A similar technique is exemplified in Harlequin literature, when an author describes her heroine’s willful nature through a longwinded description of her haughty cheekbones, her rouged cheeks, her flashy eyes. With this elaborate character sketch, one may hope to communicate some essence of her protagonist’s personality. In The Canon, Angier provides a protracted character sketch of science.

But I imagine few people come to love science through a lecture enumerating the reasons why science is so great, no matter how exuberant it is or how many silly metaphors are tossed in. Carl Sagan, the renowned astrophysicist and writer, was passionate, too. But Sagan focused on the phenomena of science, letting them speak for themselves. In The Canon, I’d prefer to have seen more of what Angier’s heroine does and how she does it—more science, please, and less style.

The Canon ranges from informative and fun to self-indulgent and obnoxious. I fear science-phobes won’t endure. I wish that Angier (or her editor) had more carefully pruned this overgrown opus. As it stands, she has penned a decent book that could have been a much better short story.

--Patrick Mundy

The study of Sindbis is important not only in terms of its ill effects on horses, though. Researchers have noticed several recent strains of the virus around the world in humans, as well. The most common symptoms of Sindbis in humans are rash, arthritis, and often fever, but the virus is, at least, not generally deadly.

The goals of Hardy’s research are many, although in a nutshell they boil down to determining the difference between the virus’s replication in arthropods (flies, mosquitoes, and other insects) and mammals. Since Sindbis hijacks its hosts’ RNA, the virus can cause havoc at the cellular level, interrupting any number of cellular processes. Just what processes are interrupted depend on the biology of the host in question, since different organisms produce and use proteins in different ways. Thus Sindbis can mean death for an equine host even after taking up residence in the mosquito that bit it.

The laboratory is replete with refrigerators for biological media, lab benches, and shelves full of various chemical primers. It’s a stark contrast to the office-like behavioral psychology labs that I’m accustomed to, where frequently a few computers or perhaps a skullcap for electroencephalography are the most technical instruments. But dress here is still just as casual. T-shirts, sweatshirts, and jeans prevail over lab coats and goggles, good evidence that this is a day job and not a promotional photo shoot for Indiana University’s admissions catalogue.

Grimard shows me a few different cell cultures that to my untrained eye look unremarkable. Among them is a culture of HeLa cells. HeLa, as I learned several years ago during some leisurely reading on Wikipedia, is a cell line derived from Henrietta Lacks. Lacks died from cervical cancer in 1951, but her cancer cells are special: They are, in biological terms, immortal, able to divide an infinite number of times so long as their basic needs are met. Countless cultures of HeLa cells are still maintained today and used worldwide for cancer research.

I ask Grimard if she finds this back-story at all unsettling.

“No, not really,” she says, shrugging.

Dr. Vasanthi Avadhanula, one of the lab’s post-docs, tells me that the cell culture room is absolutely off limits, but her smile belies her tone, and Grimard escorts me inside. A refrigerator stacked with a dozen or so Petri dishes fosters some of the cell cultures the team uses as research vectors for the virus. The room is also furnished with vacuum hoods for the researchers to work in so as to avoid unwanted contamination when implanting the virus into a new vector.

Hardy’s lab uses the Sleeping Beauty transposon, a moving segment of DNA, to mutate HeLa and hamster cells. After infecting the cells with the Sindbis virus, the scientists determine which ones survive and which ones don’t, looking at genetic differences. The shelves at Grimard’s bench house a number of Petri dishes colored violet with dye and marked by their particular mutations. A violet color indicates which cells were still alive when they were cemented in place with formaldehyde, and the clear circles, or plaques, are evidence of the virus’s handiwork. A larger plaque after a given amount of time evidences fast transmission of the virus, while occasionally no plaques show up at all. The researchers can then look closely at the genetic differences between the cell cultures in question.

One of the major difficulties is that most of the important microscopic goings-on are impossible to observe directly. Instead, the lab’s technicians carry out time-honored techniques from molecular biology in order to see events on the molecular level. Grimard uses a particular series of polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) in particular. PCRs allow researchers to look at the specific parts of a molecule. Performed with high precision machines, a PCR involves tightly controlling the temperature so that polymerase—an enzyme that reads and copies DNA in nature—can make many copies of the DNA segment researchers are interested in.

Sindbis virus disrupts a cell’s ability to make the proteins it needs to survive and communicate with other cells. When this happens, a cell dies. Other cells, however, thanks to differences in their DNA—and, therefore, how they make and use proteins—might remain alive in what is referred to as a “persistent infection”. In a persistent infection, cells continue to divide even though the virus is present, as is the case with Sindbis in mosquitoes and other insects. The goal, then, is to find the host factor—the genetic sequence in a cell—that allows them to survive.

Even after two years of rigorous research, Dr. Hardy’s team has come up empty-handed–no host factor has been identified.

“There have been many problems and setbacks,” Grimard says, “the downside of research.” What seemed initially like a straightforward problem—identifying the gene that allows some cells to divide even when the virus is present—may be more complicated. Regardless, ruling out possible factors is still good science, if only because it can lead to more questions.

“Numerous studies have identified that children who see or experience conflict when they were younger go on to have more conflict themselves when they get into relationships,” says Prof. Brian D’Onofrio, an IU researcher in developmental psychopathology. “The crucial aspect of this research is that it looks at the underlying mechanisms.”

The study examined how aggressively children reacted to their peers from the age of five and into their early 20’s using a variety of measures. The researchers asked children to give their responses to hypothetical conflict situations shown on video. Then, in their later adolescent years, researchers interviewed them about conflict in their romantic relationships. The researchers compared this information with measures of their parents’ aggressive behaviors and analyzed the data, which was amassed from over 400 children and their parents, to uncover what processes were most critical. The results showed that the kind of actions children thought were most useful in conflict situations accounted for their imitation of their parents’ approaches to conflict.

In other words, children who grew up in high-conflict environments and went on to adopt that aggression later on also viewed aggression as a more suitable solution to social clashes.

Professor Amy Holtzworth-Munroe, an IU co-author of the study, emphasized that it remains important to consider a variety of approaches to the problem of the continuation of violence through generations.

“There are very few studies that are longitudinal in the sense of being able to look at those teenage and childhood factors to look at who becomes violent in relationships,” she said. “And we need to look at other models.” She pointed to other potential key factors, such as genetic predispositions and trauma experienced by children during developmental years. Factors like the neighborhood these children were raised in or a tendency toward impulsivity inherited from parents may also be important, D’Onofrio added.

One continuing goal for this study, according to Dr. Holtzworth-Munroe, is to look at how subjects in this younger generation, now in their early 20’s, behave as long-term partners and spouses. The researchers hope to learn more as they observe these subjects as they raise children of their own.

So what can parents do to break cycles of violence? One clear way to mitigate violence in children, says D’Onofrio, is to decrease their exposure to violence.

“You can reduce intermarital conflict,” he says.

But he cautions that there are many possible causes of marital conflict that may be hard to pinpoint or control from the outside. One remedy for children who have grown up around intermarital violence is to ensure that they adopt more appropriate strategies.

Bates says it is important that children learn to respond productively to conflicts before they become adults. And parents can take steps to help their children form healthy solutions to the rocky terrain that they encounter in later romantic relationships.

Professor Kenneth Dodge of Duke University, a collaborator on this study, emphasized parents’ role in working with their children to develop appropriate reactions toward conflict.

“Some children have learned to regulate their responses through experiences, feedback, and practice,” says Dodge. Many children and adolescents, on the other hand, haven’t developed productive approaches to disagreements. Dodge also identifies children’s undeveloped skills in thinking ahead as a significant issue.

“It can help for parents to go through possible responses with their children, thinking through them and making them explicit,” Bates says.

Regardless, all the researchers agree that there’s no substitute for teaching by example.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Science Foundation.

“And that’s when the bottom just completely fell out,” she said. “I’d already had some interest in neuroscience, and the only job I could get was as a secretary, except it was a cool secretarial job—I was a secretary to two neuroscientists at Caltech.”

As a secretary she worked closely with Caltech professors Gilles Laurent and Christof Koch, both leading neuroscientists. She compares her excitement during the experience to working for Brad Pitt.

Impressed with her knack for understanding and communicating science and believing she was too smart to be a secretary, Laurent urged Heyman to work as a science writer, and one of her close friends serendipitously invited her to work for The Scientist, which eventually led her to publish in Science. Today she is a regular contributor to both magazines.

Heyman was kind enough to give up an hour of her Saturday afternoon for an interview over the phone from her home in Santa Monica, CA. Ever the pragmatist, she commented on the trials and tribulations of science journalism—most of them fiscal—as well as its rewards.

Tell me about your background.

I think I represent something that’s become a bit of an anomaly in this field. The field seems to have started mainly with reporters on general interest beats. I know a lot of people in their 60’s or 70’s or so with these wonderful stories about how they were the kid reporter and the editor said, “Okay, who wants to stay up til four in the morning and watch these NASA launches?” and they all got in on the space race early on. But none of them were really science writers. They were these kids who wanted to be reporters. And then, in my generation, it was still something like that—you were interested in journalism, and secondarily you were interested in science. The shift that I see happening now is people who are interested in science first saying, “What do I do with science? Well, maybe I’ll become a science writer.”

It’s a little more specialized now. Certainly it’s become more competitive as a field.

Oh, very competitive. And the competition is driven by two things, neither of which is good. You’ve got more grad programs graduating more people into the field. At the same time, you’ve got newspapers and magazines cutting back on coverage, which is like the perfect storm of unemployment. I make this distinction—and you’ll get people really coming to blows over this—that there’s a difference between a science writer and a science journalist. A science writer could do anything that has to do with science. And you see this conflict between the people who became public information officers and the people who became journalists.

Today you work primarily as a magazine freelancer.

Now I primarily freelance for Science, but I also write for a web site called NanoMarkets. Before, I wrote for various hardcore techy things; I was writing for a while for Triple E Computer. And I did try at one point a PIO [public information officer] job, and I found it very difficult, because my training was so antithetical to what a PIO does. A science writer is really into the explanatory stuff. And a science writer working as a PIO can give you a really good piece, whether they’re writing for a magazine or a press release. But what you’re never going to get is the half a dozen other scientists who are saying, “It’s a bunch of hooey!” And as a science journalist, although you want to get the explanation right, you also want to get the explanation right in context. All of this context is missing when you’re just doing the straight science writing for a PIO position. And if you’re trained to provide that context, it’s really hard to step away from it.

Where would you place yourself on that spectrum?

I am definitely a journalist. I am definitely someone who wants to put that context in, and the problem is that the ability to make a living purely as a journalist is getting tougher and tougher. And this is the dirty little secret of the profession: Many people who say, “Oh, I’m a freelancer” are married to someone with health insurance and a steady job. That said, there are freelancers who do make significant amounts of money, but they tend to be people who do medical writing. One of the most lucrative things out there is regulatory writing. For instance, a regulatory writer at a pharmaceutical company might write up specs on FDA regulations. And it’s lucrative because it’s boring as hell and no one wants to do it!

There’s this tension everybody in science writing talks about between accessibility and how in-depth the actual explanations are. What kinds of solutions would you suggest for that problem?

It depends on your audience, and frustratingly, it depends on your editor. You have to sort of jump over the editor. If you just happen to hit an editor who hasn’t heard of something you have, the editor will tend to see themselves as the voice of the audience, not realizing sometimes that they actually know less than the audience.

There’s also this idea that we have to figure out what the audience already knows and then build from there. There’s this view that a lot of science writers have, for instance, that anyone can understand astrophysics intuitively on some level. What is your view?

I totally understand that feeling. A country that can figure out how football plays run—and football is a relatively complex sport—surely can figure out a lay version of string theory. Brian Greene has proven that over and over. The problem is not the audience can’t get it, but that you’re dealing with editors who think your audience can’t get it. And that’s where things keep getting stripped down and stripped down and stripped down. On the other hand, there’s nothing better than a really good editor, one who makes you see the assumptions you didn’t know you were making or helps you catch the metaphor that you thought was making it better is actually making it more confusing. There is a question of what your audience will sit still for, and I’m coming to believe that it may have something to do with educational training. If you’re writing about biology for engineers, you can get really down in the weeds because that’s how engineers think. But I always find a big split between people who say, “There were too many details,” and people who say, “I wanted to hear more about the science.” It’s an ongoing argument about how much we need to sugarcoat and how much narrative we need to put in, and I don’t know the answer.

Some scientists have this idea that people should go to the source articles, but I don’t think that’s a good way to learn science for most laypeople. You have to explain the bigger picture, which scientists are notoriously not very good at doing.

Well, I do find that often scientists who have to teach undergraduates are much better at explaining things. It helps to remember how old you were when you first learned a term, and the problem with the scientists is that they often learned terms when they were quite young. And if you learned a word like “phosphorylation” when you were 14, in an advanced high school biology class, you don’t realize how wild and strange that term sounds to a layperson. There’s no question that there’s a need for science writing, and there’s no question that there’s a need for scientists to communicate to the lay public, but the problem comes down to—as it so often does—money and resources.

What is your favorite thing about the job?

You get to talk to the world’s smartest people about the thing they love, and that is just wonderful. I’ve literally lost track of the number of Nobel Laureates I’ve interviewed. In that sense, it’s astounding. It’s the greatest high on earth. But that high is counterbalanced by the fact that you talk to all these people who are experts in their field, and it makes you have this yearning to have an expertise of your own. And this is why science writers tend to want to write books—then at least you can spend a couple of years and really get to know a subject. The answer I would give you in an ideal world is different from the answer I would give you in a world where we all have to pay bills. You do what you love, but it helps to always remember the miracle of compound interest.

–Patrick Mundy

–Patrick Mundy

I heartily agreed with the session’s moderator, science writer K.C. Cole, about a very dangerous psychological disease—what Cole smilingly referred to as a “hardening of the categories." In organizing the session, Cole hoped to get her audience to soften its categories with respect to science and come to appreciate that science may not be so separate from everyday life as we often think. The panelists she assembled did much to accomplish that goal.

• Paul Preuss, a science writer from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, bridges the gap between science and non-science by writing science fiction. Much of his professional writing has examined historical and archaeological research, and he said that a major motivation for the particular stories he has pursued has been to get outside the lab and travel.

• Jennifer Ouellette, a blogger and writer, came to science writing from a background in English, but her love for science was palpable. Her most recent aim has been to convince people that there is a science to the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’d like to take a look at her book, Physics of the Buffyverse, to see how she pulls it off. She good-naturedly noted in her talk some of the scorn she’d received from scientists and non-scientists alike, but made a case that most of what she writes about is based on sound science. For instance, the Buffy magic system is based on scientific principles like thermodynamics and conservation of energy. Ouellette manages to see science in unexpected places, recounting a satisfying moment when she realized that falling rocks on the side of the road were an example of self-organized criticality. She also has written what some have described as a physics-based tour de force called Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics.

• Prof. Leslie-Pelecky, professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, played the part of the pragmatist. Her message was something of a mission statement: Americans are losing interest in science; the ivory tower of academia has lost touch with the layperson; we have to win them back by targeting their interests instead of imposing our own. When I use “we” I’m referring to those of us who are science enthusiasts already, which illustrates just how persistent the division is. Like most scientists, I tend to believe the average person should be interested in what I study (and much frustration was expressed by the two physics professors, Frank and Leslie-Pelecky, on that point, too). Nevertheless, Leslie-Pelecky argues, let’s get real—most Americans don’t need to know about quantum mechanics, game theory, or special relativity, and they know it. Leslie-Pelecky’s tactic is interesting. She teaches physics by showing the physical principles involved in NASCAR race-car driving. She makes a very astute observation, too: While university populations are hardly representative of Americans as a group, NASCAR demographic mirrors them (not to mention there are a lot of NASCAR fans out there). Dr. Leslie-Pelecky’s idea, then, is to show the layperson how cool physics is by showing them the complex inner workings of something they already love.

• Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics, the last science writer to speak and perhaps my favorite of the conference, works his day job as a professor of astrophysics at the University Rochester. His forthcoming book, The Constant Fire, examines the age-old debates between scientific and religious magisteria, and attempts to reconcile spiritual experiences with scientific ones (with special emphasis on “experience”). Frank’s philosophy particularly resonates with me. He speaks with affable enthusiasm, seeming to implicitly demand of his colleagues, “Just what about an astronomer’s wonder toward the stars isn’t a genuinely spiritual experience?” And while I imagine some scientists might have fundamental issues with Frank’s congeniality toward the idea of taking the sacred more seriously, I have to give him kudos for his optimism: The pursuit of science can be invigorating and awe-inspiring. Dr. Frank went on to assert (both in his talk and the Q & A) that it is partly the role of science to question claims about the world from scientologists, Christians, and Buddhists alike, but that surely we ought to all agree that the universe is a pretty wonderful and mysterious place.

During the Q & A, each speaker had something to say about the difficulties of teaching science—that it is unreasonable to expect everyone to be interested in string theory or fluid dynamics, amd that it’s vital to base any good explanation on a good understanding of what the person you’re talking to already knows about your subject.

Questions also came up about how to argue science with fundamentally religious people. Although all the panelists endorsed listening carefully to the other’s case, religious or not, Ouellette conceded that sometimes you “just can’t get through to those people” and that certain people’s beliefs are, for instance, “so tied up into a literal interpretation of the Bible that they just won’t listen.” And naturally a great deal of what you can expect to communicate about science has to do with the backgrounds and expectations of the people you’re speaking with.

More than anything, though, the session reminded me just how much science is about looking at the world in a particular way. And any good science writer, like any good scientist, has to be alive to how the world works. Of course, having done a good deal of laboratory research myself, I confess the work of science is by no means all wonder and excitement. If anything, this session made me realize how much I envy full-time science writers the luxury of piecing together the bigger, more fantastic picture. But here’s hoping I can prevent a hardening of the categories for myself, at least.

–Patrick Mundy

* * *

Extras!

• Adam Frank’s forthcoming book, The Constant Fire. In this book, Frank spells out the intimate relationship between his spirituality and his work as an astrophysicist, tackling the science-religion debate from an entirely new angle. By his account, religion is not in direct opposition to science, but is actually an integral part of it. The book will be released January of 2009 and lists for $24.95.

• The Physics of NASCAR by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky

• Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales of Pure Genius and Mad Science by Jennifer Ouellette

• Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics by Jennifer Ouellette

• The Physics of Buffyverse by Jennifer Ouellette

–Martina Samm