Knight Science Journalism @MIT

Science Journalism in the Public Interest

Ed Yong

The latest news, announcements, fellow and alumni updates, and other dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program.

by / October 15th 2021 / KSJ News & Events

In Latest KSJ Webinar, Journalists Reflect on Science’s Human Side

Ed Yong, the Atlantic staff writer whose Covid-19 coverage earned a Pulitzer Prize this year, knows a thing or two about how science works. He also knows the dangers of placing science on a pedestal. “Science is not just an abstract thing,” Yong said at a September webinar hosted by the Knight Science Journalism Program. “It’s not a march of progress or a series of objective truths; it’s in fact an intensely human endeavor. It’s done by people and is subject to all the frailties and foibles that humans contain.”

Those frailties and foibles, Yong noted, have been magnified during a Covid-19 pandemic that has pushed the scientific enterprise — usually painstakingly slow and methodical — to operate at breakneck pace. It has become difficult, he said, to tell the signal from the noise — to discern reliable, meaningful scientific results from those bound to buckle under scrutiny. And in that way, the pandemic also serves as a potent reminder: Now more than ever, science journalists have a responsibility to understand not just formulas and results, but the human side of how science works.

That message was a recurring theme of “The Fundamentals of Science, from Funding to Publishing,” a webinar featuring Yong, New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, award-winning freelance science journalist Emily Anthes, and moderator Joshua Hatch. The 90-minute session was the sixth in a series of live events held in conjunction with the release of the KSJ Science Editing Handbook. (A full recording of the webinar is available here.)

Anthes kicked off the session by going over the basics of the science publishing process, including the vetting process known as peer review, wherein outside experts review a scientific study, as Anthes put it, to check “that the methods and the experiments are sound, that the results add up, and that the conclusions the scientists draw are justified.”

Although peer-review plays an important gate-keeping role in scientific literature, it is not infallible, Anthes warned. For proof, one need only look back to June of last year, when two Covid-19 research papers published in two of the world’s top peer-reviewed medical journals — The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine — were retracted over concerns that they were based on unreliable data.

Such missteps are sometimes a biproduct of competing incentives, Anthes explained. For scientists, publishing — and publishing prolifically — is not only a means to communicate results but a way to build prestige and advance one’s career. It can be tempting to cut corners, which is one reason Anthes says it is imperative that science journalists continually be on the lookout for “massaged,” manipulated, or otherwise questionable data.

Yong echoed that sentiment. “The competition in academia is absolutely ferocious,” he said. “And, to make matters worse, the metric that most defines an academic success isn’t publishing high-quality, rigorous work that solves societal problems. It’s publishing as many papers as possible in high-profile journals.”

Instead of pushing scientists toward careful work, such skewed incentives in academia drive them towards practices like slicing data from a single research study into multiple smaller “publishable” pieces, as well as “cutting methodological corners, and trying to do work as quickly as possible with smaller sample sizes.”

Although these problems existed before Covid-19, and will likely remain long after, Yong urged reporters to be savvy about them. “When we look at the literature, when we talk to people, we have to really ask hard questions about all of these structures, and the incentives, and the processes that led to the kind of work that we are seeing in front of us.”

Yong also noted that Covid-19 has driven a seismic shift in scientific funding: Scientists have faced enormous pressures from funding bodies — whether academic institutes or government agencies — to put their existing research on hold and “work on this new thing.” As of December, Yong said, the medical research search engine PubMed “had archived more than seventy-four thousand Covid related papers, which is more than twice as many as there have been about diseases like polio, measles, cholera, and dengue.”

According to Mandavilli, the webinar’s final speaker, the pressure to please funders is pervasive in science. There are seemingly countless research proposals and limited money to fund them, so scientists are continually searching for ways to “make their research look attractive” to granting agencies and to make their results look good enough to justify continued grants and publications.”

And although Mandavilli believes that science is self-correcting, she said that process of self-correction takes time. “In a pandemic like this, where things are really fast, we don’t have the luxury to wait for science to correct itself.” It’s up to journalists, she said, to do their part in holding science accountable.

Shafaq Zia is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by / October 5th 2016 / Fellowship Life

At KSJ, Ed Yong Talks About the Life Inside Us

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Science writer Ed Yong speaks at KSJ’s headquarters in Cambridge. (Photo: Fabio Turone)

 

It all began 18 months ago with a trip to the zoo. Ed Yong, a science writer at the Atlantic, had been invited by Professor Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego. The mission was to discern which animals would tolerate being swabbed with a cotton bud, on which body parts. This means of collection permitted Knight to compare their microbiomes — the vast microbial colonies that inhabit every species. As Yong recalled, Knight was especially interested in creatures that emitted funky smells, a sure sign they were home to a particularly intriguing microbial landscape.

During a visit to MIT on September 20 to meet the KSJ fellows, Yong called his zoo excursion the “perfect trip.” As such, it served as the opening to his first book, published in August 2016. A New York Times bestseller, “I Contain Multitudes” outlines what we know and do not know about the bacteria that reside in, on, and around us, as well as their implications for human and animal health. Yong’s private meeting with the KSJ fellows preceded a public book talk cosponsored by the Simons Center for the Social Brain.

“I wrote this book to open up our eyes,” Yong said.

“I now understand that every visitor and animal at that zoo was a zoo in their own right,” Yong said. “All the animals and plants I can see with my own eyes are profoundly affected by things I cannot see, and without understanding them, I do not really understand myself. I wrote this book to open up our eyes to this greater view of life, because when we look at the world through the lens of microbes, familiar things take on a wondrous quality.”

Over the past 15 years, the microbiome — which encompasses the minuscule bacteria inhabiting animals, our own bodies, and practically every other surface of the world — has inspired a new scientific craze. Humans contain an estimated 39 trillion bacteria, roughly one microbe for each human cell. As Yong put it, “We’re all just half the person we think we are.” We contain multitudes. This is true across the entire animal and plant kingdoms, from sea sponges, ants, and whales to seaweed and sea anemones.

Far from passive “stowaways,” bacteria digest our food, build our organs, calibrate our immune systems, and perhaps even affect our mood and behavior. However, microbiome research is a relatively young field, and the precise nature of microbes remains unclear — do the bad bacteria cause illness or simply make it worse? Which members of bacterial communities matter? How do bacteria interact with their hosts and with each other?

“I was impressed by how Yong could talk without giving away too much of what he had written,” said Kate Telma, a student at MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, who attended the book talk. “I think it’s interesting that someone can decide to write a book — that happens to be a best seller — without having studied that one thing for their entire lives.”

Indeed, Yong’s debut as an author followed on the heels of several other careers: first a cancer researcher, then a public information officer, and finally a journalist. As he told the KSJ fellows, “I was legendarily bad at the science, and decided I was much better at writing about it than actually doing it.”

Ten years ago while still working as a PIO, Yong began his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, now part of National Geographic. The blog garnered interest from a number of publications — prompting a full-time freelance career, which ended almost exactly one year ago when Yong accepted his current position at the Atlantic. At age 34, in what little free time he has, Yong does ballroom dancing and Argentine tango. And of course, he also wrote a book.

“I’ve been interested in the microbiome for as long as I’ve been writing about science,” Yong told the KSJ fellows. He had written numerous blog posts concerning the animal and human microbiomes, but always considered them two separate research tracks (as had the scientists themselves). It wasn’t until he realized that these areas of study were deeply entwined that the book began to take shape. He composed an outline for his agent literally overnight, followed by a formal proposal during the span of a month and publication just over a year later. That one year was filled with trips to labs breeding germ-free mice, learning about the microbiomes of buildings, and his visit to the zoo.

Asked about the prospects of a second book, Yong confessed he has no ideas at the moment. Still, he added:

“Back when I was freelancing part time I said, ‘I will never go full time.’ A month later, I decided to go full time. About a year ago I said, ‘I’m a lifelong freelancer, I’ll never go back to full time employment.’ Two weeks later the Atlantic said, ‘Do you want a job?’ and I was like, ‘OK!’ So I don’t have a second book idea, but then again I am also a deeply unreliable source.”