KSJ News & Events

MIT physicist and historian David Kaiser, who heads KSJ’s home department (the Program in Science, Technology, and Society), is someone who appreciates the power of mass communication. Last week, essays by Kaiser turned up in both the Huffington Post and The New York Times

The first piece, “Of Black Holes and Glittering Stars: The Theory of Everything and Hollywood Physics”*, recounts Kaiser’s experiences at the recent Washington, D.C., premiere of The Theory of Everything, the new film about the early career of cosmologist Stephen Hawking. At the event, sponsored by the American Physical Society, Kaiser talked with English actor Eddie Redmayne, who plays Hawking in the film, and even posed with him on the red carpet.

Kaiser says he liked the film for its sensitive portrayal of the relationship between Hawking and his wife Jane (played by Felicity Jones) across the tumultous years in the early 1960s when Hawking was beginning his forays into theoretical physics, even even as he began to battle amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neuron disease.

*New York Times …

If you’re a journalist and you spend too much time listening to magazine editors talking about falling advertising and subscription revenues, or checking Columbia Journalism Review or Romenesko for updates on the latest newsroom closures, it’s easy to get discouraged about your career choice.

But now is not the time to lose heart—and in this short post I’m going to tell you why. First, though, a word of congratulations. If you’re reading this blog, that probably means you chose science, health, environment, or technology reporting as your career. So: kudos to you. It’s a noble calling and one that will only get more and more critical to the health of democratic societies as the century progresses.

In fact, the Knight Science Journalism program exists specifically to help people like you. Each year we work to introduce our Fellows to people, ideas, and themes that will enrich their work after their Fellowship year. We push them to grow and become even better at what they do. We give them time and space to add to fund of knowledge, skills, and perspective they’ll need in order to serve their audiences in the tumultuous decades ahead …

Editor’s Note: The following submission is from Barbara Moran, Knight Science Journalism Fellows Class of 2002. All KSJ alumni are welcome to send in news and updates: please contact wroush@mit.edu.

In September, I joined Boston University as the Senior Science Writer on their [Research website] (http://www.bu.edu/research), and I may have finally found my science writing home. I’ve worked for places that are edgy but have no content; and others that are solid on science but dry as dust. BU is the best of both worlds: they want strong science writing and bold design, and don’t shy away from controversy.

A great example is the e-cigarette package “Behind the Vapor” they put together for the website launch. BU has two top-notch researchers who study the personal and public health risks of e-cigarettes. Sara Rimer, who spent 26 years at the New York Times before coming to BU, wrote a feature article and pulled together two Q&A’s. The video team anchored the stories with an edgy video about e-cigs hosted by a scruffy undergrad, and the design team packaged it with stunning graphics and …

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Kelly Brieger, an old friend in the San Francisco Bay Area who has done extensive communications and public relations work for the Palo Alto Research Center, the famed Xerox-owned R&D lab. Kelly’s daughter Alexandra Brieger contributs to her high school newspaper in Menlo-Atherton, CA, the M-A Bear News, and Alexandra was wondering whether I’d be willing to work with her on an Q&A-style article.

I gladly agreed, and the finished piece was published this week. With permission, we’re republishing the original interview here. I used Alexandra’s excellent questions to give a bit of personal history about my route into science and technology journalism, and to share some advice for ambitious young people about how they can get started in their own careers…

It is perhaps very fitting that my first ever post for this blog is about “a time when I got carried away by a completely useless question.” That is, after all, a 12-word description of my entire career in science journalism.

On Tuesday, October 21, at our weekly science seminar, we had the privilege of hearing from Dr Phil Sharp, institute professor at MIT and a 1993 Nobel Laureate whose official list of achievements is longer than this entire post.

Dr Sharp’s talk was, in short, about all the things we have found and understood about RNA; the things we have found but not really understood; and the things have not even discovered. And as he kept talking about all those tiny bits of genetic and transcriptional information that are apparently there for a reason we could not even fathom ten or twenty years ago, I kept thinking one thought. Granted, it would almost assuredly not sound original at all to Dr. Sharp, but that’s one perk of being a young science journalist: I get to be unashamedly super excited by both cutting-edge research and the things scientists are already rather bored with.

The thought went like this …