News

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 …

These days, when you visit a seaside village full of scientists, there’s one obvious question to ask them: What is humanity doing to the oceans – and by extension, to the whole planet?

That question breaks down into a thousand other concerns: How would an unusually intense storm like the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 affect residents of the East Coast today? How long do the disastrous effects of oil spills really linger? Can we tweak Earth’s own natural systems to scrub the atmosphere of excess carbon dioxide? (Probably not fast enough to keep up with carbon emissions, unfortunately.)

If there was a dominant theme to last week’s KSJ trek to Woods Hole, MA, the challenge of climate change was it. Like so many classes of Knight Fellows before them, the 2014-15 Fellows spent two nights and two days in Woods Hole, visiting the town’s twin giants: the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. (Not to mention Captain Kidd and Landfall.) A parade of top local researchers turned out to talk with the Fellows, including [Jerry Melillo](http://www …