Science is one beat I never thought would interest me. First of all, I lacked the aptitude; I never passed a math or science class after sophomore year in high school. (My memory may suffer from hyperbole, but I know this: when it came to algebra, geometry, chemistry and physics, my performance sucked.)
Looking back, I think I can make a compelling argument that my teachers failed me as much as my intellect. They were stultifying. By contrast, my literature teachers helped me understand how to read, and consequently, how to appreciate good writing. I can't remember how they did it, but I have a feeling they might have been emulating what good editors do.
Case in point: In 2003, Amy Ellis Nutt, of
The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger, won the 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors award for non-deadline writing for her series
"The Seekers." The series explored five of the biggest unanswered questions of science, among them: Where does life begin; where does it end? She followed advice from her editor, Jim Willse, who told her to remember that her series "will rise and fall on your ability to make analogies."
Like Willse, my English teachers taught me the building blocks of good writing, including poetic devices like similes and metaphors. My teachers did so by balancing abstract literary theory with concrete examples from books. If only my science and math teachers could have done the same.
Lately, I've been reading a lot about neuroscience. The three-pound organ that sits in my skull fascinates me, and I've noticed that some people write about it better than others. One of my recent favorites is
"In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind."Its author, Eric Kandel, is a Nobel laureate, but he's also a great writer and storyteller. His prose gleams with clarity and vivid imagery. He braids two narratives: his scientific autobiography and the story of a 9-year-old Jewish boy forced to flee to America from the Nazis who overran his beloved Vienna.
It's a great read.
Another source of inspiration and elucidation is the 2006 edition of
"The Best American Science Writing," edited by Atul Gawande, a surgeon and
New Yorker staff writer.
Gawande's introduction to the book makes me long to travel back to 1964 so I could roam the hallways of St. Mary's High School, bearing copies of Kandel's book, handing them out to teachers, hoping the books might help them help me understand the mysteries that eluded me.
Gawande sets the bar high for science writers.
Science writing is "about the scientific investigation of the world, about the knowledge acquired, or about what happens to that knowledge when it is thrown back into the world."
And what is the "best" science writing?
"The clearest, most completely objective answer is: the best science writing is cool."
A little vague, especially for a scientist, but with the rest of his definition, Gawande makes up for it.
"I like science writing to be clear, and to be interesting to scientists and nonscientists alike. I like it to be smart. I like it, every once in a while to be funny. I like science writing to have a beginning, middle, and end -- to tell a story whenever possibile."
Like Kandel's memoir of neuoroscience and fascism, last year's best science writers rise to Gawande's standard.
One of my favorite stories in the book so far is
"My Bionic Quest for Boléro." In this piece, first published in
Wired magazine, Michael Chorost tells the gripping personal story of losing his hearing. Since birth, Chorost's hearing has been impaired, but when the world suddenly falls silent one day in 2001, the thing he finds himself missing most is a 15-minute orchestral composition by Maurice Ravel.
"Musically, it was perfect for my ear," Chorost writes of the song, which he came to appreciate as a teenager in New Jersey. "It had a structure that I could easily grasp and enough variation to hold my interest."
Chorost's attachment resounds in his precise description of the piece: "Bolero starts simply enough, a single flute, accompanied by a snare drum:
da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum, dum-dum, da-da-da-dum. The same musical clause repeats seventeen times, each cycle adding instruments, growing louder and more insistent, until the entire orchestra roars in an overpowering finale of rhythm and sound."
But this story is less about music than it is about a scientific quest that begins when a doctor installs a cochlear implant in Chorost's skull. The implant is intended to revive his hearing. Chorost explains that it would trigger "my auditory nerves with sixteen electrodes that snaked inside my inner ear."
But hardware, we learn, is only half the solution. As we accompany Chorost on his journey, we discover that his computerized implant only provides eight channels of auditory resolution. "The more channels the software delivers, the better the user can distinguish between sounds of different pitches." A normal ear has the equivalent of 3,500 channels.
It's here that Chorost climbs even further down the abstraction ladder as he uses an analogy to convey how passionately implant wearers track software improvements that boost their channel count. "Users await new releases with all the anticipation of Apple zealots lining up for the latest Mac OS," he writes.
I won't give away the ending. (It has a good one, of course.)
So, if you're looking for a good read, I suggest you check out "In Search of Memory" and "The Best American Science Writing."
They just might help you understand science a little better, too.
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Lewis Thomas was one of the best science writers... although...
