Jessie Hendricks Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Jessie Hendricks / April 2nd 2020 / Fellowship Life

Meet This Year’s Fellows: Bethany Brookshire

The Science News reporter is digging into what makes mice and other pests so successful at living with humanity, despite the lengths we go to to get rid of them.

Three years into her Ph.D research on drug addiction and the brain, Bethany Brookshire started to experience the “grad school slump.” Biomedicine wasn’t quite working for her.

So one day, Brookshire snuck away from the lab to attend a lunch on alternative careers. She kept it a secret. “To admit you were pursuing alternate careers,” she explains, “was to say that you were failing at your plans.”

More than a decade later, Brookshire is anything but a failure. An accomplished science writer and podcast host, she’s spending the 2019-2020 academic year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, studying human-animal interactions at the urban and suburban interface. And it all began, as she tells it, with her surreptitious lunchtime excursion.

At the event, Brookshire remembers running into an editor of Scientific American and boldly asking if she could write for the magazine. “To his credit, he did not laugh in my face” she says. It was 2008, and the editor suggested she start a blog. She did. Successfully. Her second blog post, on Sigmund Freud’s experience using cocaine, ended up in The Open Laboratory’s anthology of the best science blogging of the year.

In 2011, things came full circle when Brookshire’s blog, written under the pseudonym Scicurious, moved to Scientific American. By then she was doing postdoctoral research with mice at the University of Pennsylvania. Writing under a pseudonym allowed her to keep her alternate career as a science writer secret. But in a May 2013 blog post, Brookshire decided to let the cat out of the bag. A few months later, she announced she’d be taking a new full-time job with Science News. Her secret side gig was now her main gig.

Despite leaving her mouse research behind for a career in journalism, Brookshire continued to be intrigued by vermin. Before coming to MIT, she published an article on the self-domestication of house mice, which launched an interest in writing about pest-human interactions. “I love the idea that there are animals in this world who have moved in and taken advantage of what we leave behind,” she says.

At MIT, Brookshire has been digging into what makes mice and other pests so successful at living with humanity, despite the lengths people go to to get vermin out of their lives.

Brookshire credits supportive mentors at Science News for helping propel her career to where it is now. As a multi-media science journalist for Science News for Students — Science News’ digital magazine for young audiences — she writes, creates audio segments, and makes videos to inspire middle schoolers. Brookshire is aware that her work has the potential to inspire future scientists. So during her year at MIT, she has been working to become a better mentor. “I never want to say no when someone says ‘Hey can we have a phone call?’” she says.

Brookshire says she is especially interested in mentoring women and underrepresented minorities. “By the time I am old and retired and quit and decide to become a fancy mouse breeder in my old age — I want the world of [science communication] and science journalism to be the least white male place you’ve ever seen.”

This is the ninth in a series of profiles of the 2019-20 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Jessie Hendricks / November 22nd 2019 / KSJ News & Events

Donald Ingber, on Getting Research Out of the Lab and Into the World

Speaking at the Knight Science Journalism program, the Wyss Institute director showcased the institute’s diverse portfolio of bio-inspired engineering work.

Of all his accomplishments — 450 research publications, close to 200 patents, 35 years on the faculty of Harvard University — Donald Ingber is most proud of having founded the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Ingber told attendees of a seminar at the Knight Science Journalism Program on November 12. Ingber started the non-profit Wyss Institute 10 years ago with the single largest gift in Harvard’s history — $125 million dollars. A decade later, the funding, and the technological innovation, continue to flow.

In a presentation that he described as “a Disneyland ride” through bioinspired technology, Ingber showcased a long list of technologies that have emerged from the Wyss Institute’s wide portfolio of research, including vibrating shoe inserts for the elderly, a cancer vaccine licensed to Novartis, a remedy for vascular occlusion, self-assembling nanorobotic molecules, and a breathing human lung on a computer chip.

The lung-on-a-chip has attracted particular attention from investors since it was unveiled in 2010. The chip could potentially solve what Ingber sees as one of the biggest problems in health care research: a broken drug development system that’s overly reliant on mice and other animal models. “It costs probably [over] $3 billion to go from discovery at the bench to regulatory approval” said Ingber. Most of these drugs fail in clinical trials, he continued, because “over 70 percent of the time the results of animal studies are wrong.”

The lung-on-a-chip idea was conceived as a way to model real life organ functions of humans in a manner that’s safer, more ethical, and more reliable than animal studies, Ingber said. It consists of a membrane, coated with lung cells on the top and capillary cells on the bottom, that can expand and contract to mimic breathing. When bacteria are introduced on the top of the membrane to simulate a lung infection and white blood cells are introduced on the capillary side, the white blood cells are observed to penetrate the membrane and attack the bacterial invaders, just as they would in a real human lung.

The Institute is working on similar organs-on-chips that can model the gut, liver, kidney, heart, and bones. The goal, Ingber said, is to build a complete model of a human system that can be used to study how drugs move through the body. A chip may not be the perfect substitute for an actual body, Ingber said, but he believes it’s still a step in the right direction.

With a strategic intellectual property team, in-house prototype developers for commercial endeavors, and a communications department that includes animators and writers, the Wyss Institute is designed to get research swiftly out of the lab and into the world. Occasionally, projects do hit snags. For instance, Ingber recalled suffering a setback on a treatment for sepsis, a life-threatening condition commonly triggered by hospital infections, when an investor decided to back a competing product instead.

The Wyss Institute regularly touts the work of its three-dozen core and affiliate faculty through press releases and animated explainers. Ingber said that although the Institute’s early efforts to build a strong communications team were initially met with some pushback from academics, the Institute’s ethos is “Breakthrough discoveries cannot change the world if they do not leave the lab.”

by Jessie Hendricks / October 24th 2019 / KSJ News & Events

“If You’re Learning, You’re Doing it Wrong”: Behind the Scenes at The Story Collider

As co-producers of the show’s Boston series, Katherine Wu and Ari Daniel help storytellers tap into the human side of science.

To take the stage at The Story Collider, a live storytelling show that consists of “true, personal stories about science,” you don’t need to be a scientist — or even a storyteller. Katherine Wu, co-producer of The Story Collider’s Boston shows, explains you just need to have been affected in some way by science. In other words, you just have to be human.

Wu, along with fellow Story Collider co-producer Ari Daniel, helps “tellers” of all stripes turn their brushes with science into compelling narratives that explore the human side of science. The two producers spoke to Knight Science Journalism Fellows last week about the challenges and thrills of creating the live shows.

The Story Collider was started by two physicists in New York about nine years ago. Since then, it has expanded to more than a dozen cities scattered across the globe, and about a third of the live shows make it onto their podcast. During the seminar, Daniel and Wu shared audio clips from some of the memorable stories they helped shape: The story of a Harvard student’s harrowing encounter with police; of a sibling who wasn’t there for her sister when she needed it; of a poet coming to grips with a speech impediment.

One particularly riveting story, which Wu and Daniel played in its entirety, came from Richard French, an astronomer who worked on the Cassini Space Probe mission to Saturn. French spoke not only of his science career, which included being advised by Carl Sagan, but of how the journey changed him as a person. He opened up about his difficulties during graduate school, his joy at celebrating Cassini’s 21^st flyby of Titan, and the sadness he felt when Cassini flickered out of existence after being decommissioned and sent hurtling into the planet Saturn.

French’s narrative had all the traits that Daniel and Wu said they look for in a story: vivid and vibrant scenes, vulnerability, and a main character — the storyteller — who is left changed by the story’s events. But the story as French told it on stage was a far cry from the version he initially shared with the two producers, they said. His early draft hewed closely to the facts, with little of his own thoughts and emotions; Wu and Daniel encouraged French to put more of himself into the piece.

As Wu explained, that’s because the point of The Story Collider isn’t to teach people; the point is for people to connect on a human level about a subject that can feel very much “othered” in society. Wu said that she and Daniel often joke at their shows that “if you’re learning, you’re doing it wrong.” She said a Story Collider story can succeed even when people come away from it without having learned any facts: “It’s showcasing a side of science that you’re not going to find in a textbook.”

by Jessie Hendricks / September 30th 2019 / KSJ News & Events

With “Superbugs,” Matt McCarthy Explores the Human Side of Clinical Trials

The physician and writer spoke to KSJ fellows about the ethical challenges of writing his third book, which offers a look behind the scenes of a clinical drug trial.

When bestselling author and physician Matt McCarthy first told his editor at Random House that he wanted to write a book about antibiotics, he was shot down. “Hasn’t that been done?” he recalls his editor saying.

But, as McCarthy told his audience at a KSJ seminar last week, the rejection forced him to think more deeply about the story he wanted to tell. After all, his editor was right: Stories about antibiotic resistance had been done time and time again. Searching for a fresh angle, McCarthy went back to the drawing board and revisited an old strategy of his, asking himself, “What is the thing that I uniquely have access to?”

Then it clicked. He had realized that most stories about antibiotic resistance were broad overviews, told “from 30,000 feet” but missing a crucial detail: people. “That’s the thing I have access to,” said McCarthy, a physician at New York Presbyterian hospital in New York and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical School. “These patients who are being infected.”

McCarthy said the revelation planted the seed for his third book, “Superbugs: The Race to Stop an Epidemic,” which chronicles his experience conducting clinical trials of an antibiotic designed to target drug-resistant microbes. The book is an up-close and personal narrative that frequently takes the reader right into the room with McCarthy and his patients. Right after conversations, McCarthy recalled, “I would walk out of the room and type them up.”

During the seminar, KSJ fellow and healthcare reporter Tony Leys asked whether writing about patients has ever put McCarthy in a touchy situation, “when you’re talking to this patient and part of you is saying, ‘Oh boy, this is a good story.’”

McCarthy said the ethical dilemmas were challenging — he had to change patients’ names and a wide range of their identifying qualities to protect patient privacy, for instance — but he also said he didn’t have time to think about his book while in the room with his patients.

“I have so many patients that I see and so much clinical responsibility, that I can’t have that on the forefront of my mind,” he said. He explained that he’s never intentionally tried to dig something out of a patient for the sake of a story, though occasionally “they offer up something.”

Another ethical dilemma McCarthy faced was writing about his colleagues. He wanted to be truthful, but he didn’t want to write a book that would offend his coworkers. “The biggest challenge for me up front was writing about Tom Walsh,” McCarthy said, referring to his mentor of almost ten years, who he described in the book as “thin and pale, like a potato chip.” McCarthy recalled reading nearly the entire manuscript aloud to Walsh, to give him an opportunity to provide feedback — but not the chance to markup pages with edits.

Despite all those challenges, McCarthy told the fellows he felt it was important for “Superbugs” to feel personal. He said a book about drug-resistant microbes could easily end up being a bummer — after all, superbugs are predicted to be the number one cause of death in the year 2050. But he wanted the book to also feel hopeful and exciting, “and the way for it to suffuse those thoughts into a very serious topic is to have a human connection.”

Noting that such narrative writing is rare among the doctors and researchers he’s encountered, KSJ fellow Richard Fisher asked McCarthy whether he’s always written in that style or if he had to learn along the way.

“No, they’re all like this,” McCarthy responded. “I want you to be in the room, I want to grab whoever I’m writing about, and bring them right into your face, so that you can feel everything that’s happening right there.”