Leaving my L390 Children’s Literature class in Jordan Hall, I happened to mention the assignment in passing to a  classmate. She told me that Biology is the place to be. Not only is it practical, but the experiments done in the lab are fascinating, especially with genomics.

After learning a bit about genomics through the beer article, I walked to Simon Hall 409.   I was amazed at how new the building was,  and upon walking into the lab, how neat, orderly, and clean I found it,  full of machines that spin, glass-holding areas with large beakers, freezers, and water containers with what looked like it had electrodes inside.   I could not help myself but look around at everything. All the machines had little stickers faces on them, which made me laugh.

I ran into two different post-doctoral students who explained to me that the lab was not just made for one group, but that it was sectioned off. They were going to get coffee and were in a hurry, so they could not explain the difference in the lab just then.  But they told me that they were happy that I was doing an assignment like this and that exploring the lab will spark a lot of questions, and it did.

Before I knew it, I had spent an hour walking around. I was looking at data on the wall with charts that had letters and numbers on them with what seemed like an impossible code. A young woman came up to me as said she had overheard my conversation with the post-docs.  She referred me to Daniel Kearns, the overseer of the lab. He was brilliant, she said,  and helped many of the scientists with their studies, playing a very active role in everything having to do with molecular biology and genetics. I knew this was the lab I wanted to observe!

Friday November 22, 9:00-10:30am

After speaking with Daniel Kearns via email, I learned that there really were not any large scale experiments going on, but that there were  always people around working on projects. I decided to come in as early as possible, to catch people setting up and spend as much time as I could there. The first person I happened to run into while walking again through the lab was Kearns himself.  Young, with an ear-piercing, he  was nothing like what I had expected, given his prestige.  He was very friendly and open to having me meander through the lab.  

Just talking to him made me think back to my sophomore year in high school when I worked for a brief period in New Zealand. The Katipiki Ecological Restoration Project, also known as KERP, is a non-profit organization designed to help improve the balance of nature and its inhabitants, and I was able to spend a month looking at marine life and the forest areas. My comrades back then were as enthusiastic as Kearns was about his lab and what was going on there.  But somehow over the years I had fallen into a stereotypes, judging scientists as older adults I couldn’t relate to.   

He explained that the portion of the lab that I was looking at was mainly centered on genomics. He introduced me to post-doctoral students, to undergrads who were testing out the lab to see if it was a good fit for them, and to doctoral students in the process of working on their own experiments. It was within this initial tour with its  chit-chat that I found an experiment I wanted to know more about. This experiment became the center of my entire lab experience.

November 22, 10:30-11:30 pm: What I learned about the Kearns lab

Discussion between me and Daniel Kearns

What kind of lab is it?
It is a bacteriology lab and we use genetics and molecular biology to answer the questions we ask.

What is the field of science studied within the Kearns Lab?
We study bacterial motility. In particular, we study how bacteria move over the tops of surfaces.

What are the other areas studied in that lab (others have mentioned that there are other areas)?
All projects are related to motility in one way or another. The bacteria synthesize a motor to turn a corkscrew like filament that acts like a propeller to push the cells through the environment.

• We are studying how flagellar genes are regulated and how the flagellum is assembled.
• We study how cells change their physiology when moving over surfaces and the special proteins that are required to do so.
  
• We study how a protein (that we call a "clutch") stops the flagella from rotating and prevents the cells from moving.
  
• We study how cells stop moving and form a multicellular aggregate called a biofilm.

Who uses the lab? Is it all doctoral students?
I have four doctoral students, and one post-doctoral student. We also always have at least one undergraduate researcher in the lab.

Was science always something you wanted to pursue?

Originally it was always something I loved as a kid. My father would always bring me books about science and stars and so forth. I loved reading about science; I especially loved dinosaur books…every kid loves dinosaur books, I certainly did. I was a great reader, especially in the area of science fiction, which gives you such a sense of imagination. I took science and math courses in high school, but I was interested in classical music. I didn’t really think about going into science professionally until sophomore year of college. I had taken math and had always enjoyed it, but as an elective, I took a physics course that was intended for majors. I wasn’t thinking of it as a major, but I had this professor who had so much excitement, enthusiasm, and conveyance of the material that it was such a joy to learn.

So it was the way that the material was presented to you?

There is a very odd thing in physics courses, the usual problems of equations and how fast will the ball drop that most people hate. I actually got a tremendous trip out of those sorts of problems. It gave me a sort of connection to the universe that somehow I could understand, but not only read and comprehend, but also figure it out and see how everything ebb and flowed. It was just this incredible beautiful feeling that is hard to describe.

So how did journalism come into your life?

After having taken all these physics courses, I just had to become a physics major. Eventually after I got my PhD, I had to make some very difficult decisions. I actually had a job as a postdoc, but everyone I knew was spending two years in a holding pattern where you would inevitably remain an intern. I decided I was not going to put myself through that and decided to move on. I had done some investigating and found that there were jobs in journalism, and in science journalism.

Did you have any reservations in starting something new after receiving a PhD?

The decision to leave physics was very hard for me. You can imagine, being a physicist wasn’t just what I did, it was all I was, and I had to find myself in a way. To leave was almost like, in some ways, this horrible admission of failure, and even just conceiving myself in other terms was frightening; I would think of myself as a failure, my colleagues and friends would look and think of me as a failure, and so I was very nervous about that. As it turns out, my colleagues at the physics department were incredibly supportive. The university looked at it as a great idea. I needed to get out of this trap.

Were the classes easy for you?

Because I had never taken a journalism class before, Newswriting 101 class was the hardest thing I had intellectually ever had to do. I found it much harder than physics. Just trying to figure my way through stories and organize the material was challenging, even though I had always enjoyed writing and thought I was pretty good at it.


How do you feel about writing topics that are not physics?

It was intimidating at first, and in some ways it is easier, because writing about something that you know extremely well can lead you into a trap. For example, the first assignment we had in Newswriting 101 was to go and interview a professor here on campus and write a story about their research. I went to visit a professor I knew in the physics department. I had known him for a long time. I knew he was doing some very interesting research, and sat down for a chat and took notes. It was great stuff, and was going to make a great story. Then, I began to think about who my audience was, and who would be reading the story, and I saw that I had no useable quote in that entire interview. The reason why was because he had been talking to me like a professional. He used the jargon and the technical terms, which to me, sounded like English because I knew what he was talking about. For me to relate this to a reader I would have to uncork every one of those terms and there was just no way that those quotes would be comprehensible. That was a tremendous lesson to me that you really have to step back and put yourself in the place of somebody who doesn’t understand any of it.

Writing about other sciences usually didn’t give me too much of a problem. I might feel very ignorant of something, but I could at least call people up and talk to them and just confess that I’m writing about biology or neuroscience, and I’m a physicist…can you help me figure this out? The physics degree did give me a lot of credibility. But in general, most scientists are so flattered to be asked that they are happy to help.

Is there any area that poses trouble for you?

Some areas have given me trouble, especially on a deadline. One that I got myself into because I was curious about it was the impact of genomics on medicine. It was very complex; it got me into the business model of the drug companies and the basic assumptions about insurance, and all these things that I had absolutely no framework for whatsoever. And that was actually very hard, simply because I knew vaguely where to start looking, and didn’t know what questions to ask, or who to ask.

Another one that turned out to be very hard but very interesting, for a variety of reasons, was when a business magazine asked me to write an article about the origins of productivity. And so I started getting into the whole history of how people and economists look at productivity and how they analyze innovation. Turns out economists have a hell of a time accounting for innovation. They know it happens; they just don’t have a theory as to how it happens. I was reading all of this information, but it was such an alien subject to me that it was just hard to wrap my head around it. It seemed that every time I looked around, there was another angle to pursue. That’s what really makes it hard. By reading one paper, or talking to one person, they keep pointing you in different directions, and then you think where does it all fit together? In terms of the sciences, usually I have an easy time talking to scientists.

Is there a particular topic you especially enjoy?

There are just so many, it’s hard to pick one. Particle physics and string theory where I started is extremely fascinating, and it is where I started from, but it is also very difficult to write about, and I actually have not written that much on it. With science, you have to explain that most of the progress in science, whether physics or molecular biology, is by taking things apart and seeing how they work and looking at how the components go together. Looking at smaller and smaller components in the brain, for example, and looking at the synapse, and the cell. This is something that science journalists look at, because they can understand individual pieces, but how quarks go together to make a proton, becomes very complex.

With the advancement of science, have you seen journalism changing?

What I find fascinating is commuting and communications. Not so much the hardware per se, but how people are using it. The whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, for example, is an important form of online community building. Software as a service like Googledocs, and things like that, and social networking. This is a very interesting movement. For years and years, book publishing has always been from the author to the publisher to the audience. TV and radio have always been from content to news server. You have passive audiences just receiving content like a college lecture. People are now able to become active; they can participate and contribute their own content. They can comment, form their own communities; they can come in sideways instead of through the central authority. That is changing just about everything, especially in publishing and journalism. It is not only changing business models, but how we do what we do.

Is this free-flow of information hurting the profession and it’s credibility?

I think ultimately it will help. We are going through a very confusing time right now with so many experiments. People are putting content on the web rapidly, and when someone else calls you on incorrect content, it can be easilly fixed. One large problem is the widespread unfounded rumors, which go around, but that is hardly unique to the web. As more people become practiced, the whole post-and-check style of the web should become the norm. Blogs and the Blogosphere are simply an echo chamber for people to contribute their views on articles they have read in the Times and so forth, and express ideas.

The web is a delivery mechanism, it is a medium. It has a lot of advantages that are multidirectional and powerful. Some of the fundamental things that the media offers today is aggregation of some of the best material, selection and what is worth spending your time on, being able to support going out and doing some original reporting which takes a lot of time. There will be a lot of maturing and evolution going on throughout the media and publications, but will have to morph, and will become a richer ecosystem of sources and delivery.

How do you do your research as a science writer?

In the few times I get to write anymore, as most of us, you can now do a lot of preliminary stuff just by Googling to get a sense of what is out there and so forth. By finding old news articles, getting some back-story from GoogeScholar. It is a lot easier than it once was doing research in the library, but the library can still be very helpful. It is hard to remember that. When you gather a lot of information, you get a sense of what is going on but your work doesn’t really start as a reporter until you start talking to people because there is something that a book or the Internet cannot give you that an interview can, and that is context. You can type in some words and get a bunch of hits, but until you talk to people who are really involved in the story, you will not fully know what is going on in the story. That is the true essence of what you are trying to get, “What’s going on?”

Is that your primary objective?

What you should be fundamentally asking people “What’s going on here?” “What’s happening?” “What are the issues at stake?” “Who else is involved that I should be talking to?” and “What questions should I be asking?” Each person you talk to is going to have a different perspective. They are going to give you a different list of people to talk to and a different list of questions. It’s when it all starts to converge and you receive the same information from people you’ve already spoken to that you know that you’ve done your homework and talked to them all.

Does it usually come out that easily?

Well everyone has a slightly different perspective. You think you may understand everything, but then someone will come along who crystallizes it perfectly, and they could be the fifth or sixth person you’ve talked to. You may think you’ve got the story and that these people are on the side of the angels, and the others are just the devils incarnate, but you’ve got to talk to them; give them a chance to say something, they may have something to say. Journalism forces you to stretch your mind around other points of view. You don’t need to believe it necessarily or agree with it, but you have to understand it well enough to express it fairly.

–Theresa Bradtke

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