As a child, Ahmad Gamal Saad-Eddin would sneak into his uncle’s library, reading books across genres, from science fiction to philosophy. “One of the writers that I loved most was Naguib Mahfouz,” he says, “And I was fascinated by his use of language to express feelings.”
Inspired, Saad-Eddin began writing his own science fiction stories as a teenager. “Colonizing mars, laser guns, fight with the aliens, a lot of that,” he recalls. This passion and love for writing stayed with him, and he continued writing even during his ten years of rigorous medical training at Zagazig University in Egypt, where he specialized in psychiatry.
Eventually, Saad-Eddin transitioned to science writing, first as the science section head for Manshoor.com, and then as an editor at Nature Arabic Edition. He then became a scriptwriter, and eventually a fact-checker, for a leading Arabic science YouTube show called “El-Daheeh.”
All these years later, Saad-Eddin still carries the literary spirit that was kindled in his uncle’s library, weaving human experiences into his stories about science.
“Science is the finest product of human nature,” he says, “but it also has conflicts and flaws, because it’s a human product.” This view of science through a human lens is a throughline in almost all his work.
As a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, Saad-Eddin is working on his most personal project yet – a book that weaves the history of medicine with his own story of loss and discovery. I spoke to him about his journey from medicine to journalism, his unique approach to science writing, and how a personal tragedy deepened his understanding of medicine and its role in society. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Pratik Pawar: Your work often melds science and philosophy in very interesting ways, different from typical matter-of-fact science reporting. How and why do you take this approach?
Ahmad Gamal Saad-Eddin: Some people would say that you shouldn’t [intermix] science and the tools of literature. But I disagree with that because science is a human product. And as a human product, you should always deal with that in your understanding and your ability to formulate ideas about that, and you couldn’t do that without literature.
Fiction is about how people understand themselves, and how they interact with the world. And that’s also science because a lot of scientific phenomena around us can only be understood by understanding yourself and how science affects people. For example, Covid was something that really affected people’s life, but you can’t understand the real impact of the pandemic without addressing how people dealt with being in the middle of it. How they deal with vaccines, why there is suspicion against vaccines, why there is all this huge amount of misinformation and disinformation. We can’t understand that only by science, we have to dig deep into ourselves.
PP: You transitioned from being a psychiatrist to a science writer. How did that shift occur?
AGSE: The transition from medicine to science writing happened bit by bit. I was a psychiatrist back home, and psychiatry is very complicated and different from traditional medicine. It has this element of dealing with the mind, dealing with the untouchable things. In most medicine specialties, you know what you’re dealing with. You can describe it, there is a physicality. But psychiatry is something [where] you have to depend on the language and on the way of understanding the world around you.
Beginning third year of medical school, I began publishing these articles and short stories I was writing. My main focus was the Arabic audience. But now I’m thinking of expanding a little more, writing in English, writing to a broader audience. I realized that voices from places like ours, the Global South, aren’t well represented in the global talk, and we have a right to be there. We have a right to express ourselves, or telling the world about how we see things.
PP: What was your first job in science journalism, and how did it shape your approach?
AGSE: After finishing my psychiatry [degree], I got an offer from this journalist named Ahmed Harbia. When he contacted me, he was establishing his own website, which is called Manshoor.com. Manshoor was a pan-Arab website that’s interested in a lot of subjects, like science, philosophy. And Manshoor was trying to explore the big questions rather than focusing on the moment.
I established the science section at Manshoor, and it gained a lot of interaction with people, because it was a new way of understanding science and trying to get the audience to engage with scientific themes and scientific ideas without just reporting about science. This was a way of trying to understand science as a social phenomenon, and actually appealed to a lot of readers. For example, there was this Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who made gene editing on humans, and got into a lot of trouble. We decided not only to just report the incident, but also to think about, what does it mean to edit human genes, and why we don’t do that.
And then I began to work with Nature Arabic edition. Manshoor was a startup, so you have all the liberty in the world, but Nature was an institution, a very established one, a very routine one, a very bureaucratic one. But that benefited me a lot, because you have to deal with this rigorous fact-checking. And when you are this big, you can’t make mistakes, especially when there is a pandemic.
PP: And then from working at Nature Arabic Edition you went on to work at a YouTube science channel. How was that experience different from print journalism?
AGSE: El-Daheeh is a very popular science show in Arabic. It can be roughly translated to English as “the nerd.” I think that is one of the most important experiences in my life because here it is, a science show that targets the Arabic audience. And science isn’t – like anywhere else – a very popular subject in the Arab world. And people deal with science with a lot of suspicion. Despite all of that, the show was beginning to gain a huge impact on the Arabic audience. People loved the show, loved what we are talking about, loved that we are able to deliver interesting stories about science and entertaining stories about how science works.
In script writing, you are actually imagining how these words will be spoken loudly, and you are not writing to be read. When you are writing for the video form, you have to grab the viewer’s attention. And I began to actually deploy these techniques in my usual writing.
PP: What are you working on now at the Knight Science Journalism Program?
AGSE: KSJ is one of the most amazing opportunities science journalists can get in their life. I applied to the program with an idea about a book project. I’m writing a book about the history of medicine and how it affects people’s lives. I’m also intending to incorporate a very personal aspect into the book.
I had a hard experience because my father died due to Covid. I had this very strange experience because I had to deal with this disease and the pandemic on three different levels. A science writer, a past doctor, but also, as a son who is seeing his father deteriorating because of an infection that medicine can’t treat [yet]. So, I thought maybe I should write about what role medicine played in my life and in my father’s life, and how medicine evolved to this moment we are living right now, and how we can understand it.
Everything we do is somehow to stay alive in the most basic sense, we are always trying to survive, and medicine in a way has helped us do that. People’s lives are going up, not down, and that’s great but also maybe at these times we have to think, what does it mean to be alive in this moment? What does it mean to be affected by medicine to this limit?
After my father died, I began writing about the personal stuff. Then I realized that there is something missing in this story. I realized that the missing element here is the history. I can’t continue writing this story unless I get to understand how things unfolded around me. This is a bit contradictory, but I realized that in order to write about yourself, you will have to write about everything else. So, in order to understand myself, in order to continue writing this personal story, I have to go on a journey to write about the history of medicine and the philosophy of medicine and how medicine affects our lives, and how science affects our lives.
Pratik Pawar is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
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