KSJ News & Events

As a science journalist you cover a lot of stories over the years. Some wash over you without leaving much of a mark and some stick with you for eternity. Yesterday one of those eternal stories—probably the story that has been the strongest thread across my 17 year career—took a huge leap forward. British MPs voted to allow the creation of babies that have DNA from three people—so-called three-person IVF. If the second house of the UK Parliament—the House of Lords—also supports the measure the UK will be the first country in the world to approve such a procedure and the first baby could be born next year.

I have been covering this research for a decade and it is a rich and complex subject involving a devastating disease, some heartrending personal stories, truly amazing science and a complex ethical debate that has thoroughly tested the regulatory system in the UK …

For writers, part of the fuss about the Web explosion of the late 1990s was that it was finally possible to cut out the middlemen. Blogs meant you could reach readers immediately and directly, without all the usual apparatus of the commercial media—editors, publishers, advertisers, circulation managers—getting in the way.

Whether professional writers could turn a direction connection with their readers into a real living was a different question. In practice, most journalists who were attracted to the immediacy of blogs, including myself, wound up working for online or hybrid print/online publications that ran their businesses on advertising, or on some combination of advertising, corporate underwriting, and event revenue.

Much later, with the advent of off-the-shelf paywall and subscription software, writers could once again think about selling their ideas directly to the readers most willing to pay. But very few journalists have actually tried this. Andrew Sullivan is a famous example (though his publication The Dish now seems poised to shut down). Many in San Francisco/Silicon Valley are watching online-only tech news site TheInformation.com to see whether its creator Jessica Lessin, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, can persuade a critical mass of technology industry insiders to pay $399 per year for her publication. TheInformation promises subscribers an inside view of the trends shaping the computer, software, mobile, and Internet industries. “No aggregation, no bullshit,” the site says. “We only write articles that matter to our subscribers and are backed by exclusive reporting.”

Now biotech industry insiders have a similar option: the Timmerman Report. Unveiled yesterday by veteran journalist Luke Timmerman, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow in 2005-06, it’s a subscription-only publication aimed at professionals in the life sciences industry. Timmerman is the sole staffer, and he’s charging $99 per year.

It’s a daring career move, considering that …

There are roughly 100 trillion cells in your body, but only about 10 trillion of them are human. The rest are microorganisms such as bacteria.

Which begs some fundamental questions: Who are we, really? We think of ourselves as individual humans, but from the bacteria’s point of view, we’re more like giant hotels, engineered to carry them around the planet’s surface and meet their biological needs. In fact, it’s not incorrect to think of our bodies as colonies or super-organisms, alive thanks only to the intricate genetic and biochemical dance that’s evolved over hundreds of millions of years. (It now seems that as much as 8 percent of the human genome is composed of DNA from retroviruses.)

That’s a theme that has long interested two Knight Science Journalism alumni from Germany, Hanno Charisius (2010-11) and Richard Friebe (2006-07). They recently joined forces to write a book about the bacteria all humans live with—in their guts, on their skins, in their eyes, and elsewhere. It’s called Bund fürs Leben – Warum Bakterien unsere Freunde sind. According to Friebe, that translates into something like “Together for Life—Why Bacteria Are Our Friends.”

Friebe and Charisius write about the signifance of the human-bacteria symbiosis for health and disease; the implications reach far beyond the gut (home to the majority of our bacterial passengers) to topics like…

How did antibiotics become such a central part of modern industrial agriculture? What are the consequences? Who’s rethinking practices around antibiotic use on farms, and what are they learning? Those are the big questions journalist Maryn McKenna wanted to investigate when she started her Project Fellowship with the Knight Science Journalism program in August, 2013.

Seventeen months later, she’s a lot closer to understanding the full impact of rampant antibiotic use in meat production—and it isn’t pretty. Farm animals in the U.S. get four times more antibiotics, by volume, than humans, helping to drive myriad bacteria like staphylococcus to evolve resistance to the drugs on a scale that “is now authentically a worldwide crisis,” McKenna says. “Disease bacteria have become so resistant that we are in fact flirting with the end of the antibiotic era.”

Drawing on reporting she conducted during her Fellowship year, McKenna is writing a book about antibiotics in farming and has also produced a series of short videos on approaches to reducing antibiotic use on farms (see several of the videos below). On top of all that…

On Tuesday, December 30, The New York Times devoted its full Tuesday ScienceTimes section to a massive, groundbreaking investigation of one critical question: Why wasn’t West Africa’s huge Ebola outbreak prevented?
The exhaustively reported piece, by Kevin Sack, Sheri Fink, Pam Belluck (a Knight Science Journalism Fellow in 2007-8), and Adam Nossiter, assigns blame judiciously but unsparingly.

There were the now-familiar geographical and cultural factors: the fact that the outbreak began in a poor, isolated region where members of extended families could easily cross borders between Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia; inexperience diagnosing Ebola (which is endemic to Central Africa, and whose symptoms resemble cholera and other more common conditions); burial traditions that involved extensive contact with the virus-laden bodies of the dead; the history of war, corruption, and exploitation that left many West Africans distrustful of outside medical help.

But the report also shines light on…