knight science journalism Archives - Page 4 of 7 - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Lydia-Rose Kesich / January 14th 2018 / Fellowship Life

This Year’s Fellows: Ehsan Masood

His quest: Track down every living Harvard and MIT scientist persecuted under McCarthyism.

This is the fifth in a series of profiles of the 2017-18 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

By the time Leon Kamin was summoned to explain himself to his boss’s bosses, he knew exactly why he had been singled out and what he would be asked. He had known from the moment he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights during his interrogation by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security that he would answer for it when he returned to his teaching position at Harvard. And as for the questions, there was really only one: Tell us the names of the other Communists you know.

“And of course he wouldn’t,” Ehsan Masood tells me nearly 70 years later, at a coffee shop just one Red Line stop from the site of Kamin’s interrogation. “He said, ‘That’s none of your business. You found me and I’m declared, I’ve put my hand up, but actually all the others are absolutely none of your business.’” Of course Kamin (who died at 89 on December 22, a few months after his interview with Masood) wouldn’t have delivered these lines in an impeccable British accent, but I’m not about to interrupt Masood to tell him so. The Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT has brought him here from London, where he was editor of Research Fortnight until August 2017. During his nine-month fellowship, he intends to track down every living Harvard and MIT scientist persecuted under McCarthyism; many have never publicly told their stories.

Masood didn’t originally intend to be a journalist — growing up, he was fascinated by physics. He thinks this early interest may have had something to do with his parents, an author and an actuarial scientist, both of them deeply religious. “Physics is all about the big questions,” he explains. “…It was very interesting to me as a young person growing up in a devout environment to think, ‘Oh, here’s a science that can perhaps lead us to God.’”

Once he reached the university level, however, Masood realized that the mathematics required of a physicist were beyond his abilities or interests. He started teaching physics and writing, eventually taking a low-level job with a news agency in London. It was toward the end of the Cold War: the Soviets invading Afghanistan, the Taliban hunting Communists, and the Americans funding the Taliban on the sly. There was so much news coming in that Masood occasionally got to write a short piece between photocopying clips and making tea. That was the start of a journalism career that has now led him to Cambridge and the task of tracking down Leon Kamin and the others like him.

Masood hopes meeting them will give him a realistic idea of what might happen if there is a modern crackdown on academics. These insights couldn’t come at a better time. “Right now, university campuses all over the world are in great ferment,” he tells me. Teachers and students may have been in open rebellion when Kamin’s story took place, but the story unfolding now still leaves Masood excited, unsettled. “There’s a resurgence of activism there that, to be honest, I’ve never seen.”

by Timothy James Dimacali / January 4th 2018 / Fellowship Life

This Year’s Fellows: Kolawole Talabi

In northern Nigeria, thousands have died in conflicts between farmers and livestock herders, “and it’s a crisis I felt I needed to do something about.” Photo: Joshua Hatch.

Kolawole Talabi takes his food very seriously.

The wiry, soft-spoken gentleman from Nigeria leans forward intently when asked about how concern over food production brought him to the Knight Science Journalism fellowship.

“In many parts of the world,” he begins after a moment’s thought, “meat production is an age-old economic activity that a lot of people are involved in. And if you go to developing countries, you still find that the way meat is produced is totally different from what you have in America or Western Europe.

“In the northern part of Nigeria, we’ve had conflicts between herding communities and farmers.… Because of climate change, population explosion, urbanization … the pressure on land has become very intense.… Thousands of people have been killed in the last few years, and it’s a crisis I felt I needed to do something about.”

For his fellowship research project, Talabi at first hoped to focus on that crisis. But finding few experts in the Cambridge area who understood the nuanced challenges of African transhumance — the seasonal movement of livestock from one grazing ground to another — he decided “to redirect my energies to work on shark conservation.”

“Fish is a cheap and ubiquitous alternative to meat as a source of protein for over 2 billion people in the world’s poorest regions,” he explains. “But then, not all fish belong on plates and platters.” Shark are imperiled in part because of the worldwide appetite for their fins.

Before coming to MIT, Talabi earned several accolades for his freelance science writing, including the World Health Summit Next Generation of Science Journalists Award in 2016. But he didn’t start out in journalism; in college he had a passion for cartography, and he had an earlier career as a researcher for a mobile company.

“The research skills I had formed while working for Nokia,” he says, “were a strong motivation for me to practice journalism, especially when you have to deal with technical and complex subjects.” And, he adds, “I’ve always enjoyed writing.”

Shortly before he began his fellowship, he won an impactAfrica award from the International Center for Journalists that allowed him to tour U.S. digital newsrooms, government agencies, and journalism schools in New York, Washington, Baltimore, and Atlanta.

“I had the privilege of meeting leading scientists and media luminaries at The New York Times, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Georgetown University,” among others, he says. “But for me the highlight of the tour was the visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, where I saw how one man challenged the evil of racism and yet triumphed over it even in death.”

by Heather Mongilio / December 28th 2017 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

This Year’s Fellows: Jane Qiu

She has traveled around the world and filed stories from far-flung corners of the planet — from the Arctic to the Antarctic to the peaks of the Himalayas.

It took more than 3,000 miles for Jane Qiu to travel around Tibet.

For a major article in Nature, Qiu, a freelance journalist based in Beijing, crisscrossed the nation to speak with government officials, herders, and researchers about the changes, both good and bad, affecting the grasslands — a vast area where nomadic people graze herds of livestock.

The article, “Trouble in Tibet,” appeared in January 2016. Qiu says it’s one of her favorites. The problems of the grasslands — an area about a quarter that of the U.S. landmass, spread over multiple regions affected by different climates — can’t be addressed with sweeping generalizations.

“Ultimately,” Qiu said, “I hope the article can influence policies about the conservation of the grasslands,” and lead to changes that will benefit its people.

Qiu recently traveled again for journalism, this time almost 7,000 miles from Beijing to Cambridge, Massachusetts. She’s currently one of the 10 Knight Science Journalism fellows at MIT.

She didn’t start out as a journalist. She has a doctorate in cancer genetics and has completed two postdoctoral fellowships, including one in New York about nerve regeneration. So how did a scientist with degrees in life sciences come to write about grasslands in Tibet? It had to do with a newspaper and a former inmate.

Qiu was completing her second postdoctoral fellowship in London when she came across an article about Eric Allison. A habitual thief, Allison spent most of his life behind bars and became an activist, campaigning on issues of racism and abuse in prison. After writing endless petitions and campaign leaflets, he realized that writing gave him a buzz similar to the one he got from stealing. Eventually he became The Guardian’s first prison correspondent.

Reading about his life was an epiphany for Qiu, who by then had realized she did not want to pursue a career in academics. “I knew I enjoyed writing, but I never really thought I could make a career out of it,” she said. Allison’s story “in a way changed my life. Writing is a calling I cannot resist.”

After spending two years as an editor at Nature Reviews Neuroscience — which afforded valuable insight into publishing — Qiu began freelancing full time in 2006. Since then, she has traveled around the world and filed stories from far-flung corners of the planet — from the Arctic to the Antarctic to the peaks of the Himalayas. Besides Nature, her work can be read in Science, Scientific American, and The Economist.

Stationed mostly in Beijing, Qiu is passionate about development and environmental issues in China and other Asian countries. And though she rarely tackles life sciences these days, her education as a scientist allows her to better understand science and the scientific mindset — along with the fact that scientists are fallible no matter how accomplished they are. “I think the nuances are really important,” she said. “Science is complex and often controversial.”

by Frankie Schembri / December 8th 2017 / KSJ News & Events

A Lively Discussion, Even for KSJ: Edmond Awad on His ‘Moral Machine’

A game in which “people could design their own moral dilemmas.” Photo: MIT Media Lab/Margaret Evans.

Perverse, puzzling, and unlikely, the “trolley problem” is perhaps the best known modern thought experiment — a fixture in many an introductory ethics or philosophy class. The question it poses is how to stop a runaway train car: Do nothing and kill five people on the track, or pull a lever to switch to a different track and kill just one person?

As a postdoctoral associate in the Scalable Cooperation group at MIT Media Lab, Edmond Awad helped to develop an updated trolley problem: the moral dilemmas facing the designers of driverless cars, which could well be a dominant mode of transportation in coming years. Awad’s research on a project called Moral Machine was the topic of the KSJ fellows’ November 14 seminar.

“Driverless cars, as you all know, are already on the roads,” said Awad. “Which is great, because experts say that these cars will be decreasing 90 percent of the accidents that we have today. For the other 10 percent, some of them might involve the car facing moral dilemmas and having to force fatalities.”

Studies have shown a discrepancy between what individuals say driverless cars should do and what kind of car they would actually purchase. Drivers tend to say that they want cars to protect pedestrians, but also that they would not buy such a vehicle themselves.

To collect vast amounts of data on human perspectives about such decisions, Awad and his team launched the Moral Machine website, in which visitors play an interactive game that presents them with a choice of two decisions in a variety of randomly generated crash scenarios. As in the trolley problem, the visitor must choose to swerve or stay the course, sacrificing either the people in the car or one group of pedestrians to save other pedestrians.

Compounding the choices, the game presents players with different types of pedestrians and vehicle occupants. “We have the elderly,” Awad said. “We have executives. We have doctors, athletes, a pregnant woman, a homeless person, criminal, a baby, dog, and a cat.”

After visitors complete the game, they can submit their results as well as some details including their home country, age, and gender. There is also a section in which visitors can build their own scenarios, and a forum in which people can discuss their reasoning with other participants.

“We had four million users visit the website,” Awad said. “Three million of those actually completed the decision-making task, and they clicked on 37 million individual decisions. There’s also the survey that comes after, which is a little bit more work, and we still have over half a million survey responses.” The Scalable Cooperation group plans to publish the full results of the study in an upcoming paper.

The talk spurred a discussion that was lively even by KSJ standards. Fellow Teresa Carr asked Awad about the reasoning behind the character attributes included in the scenarios. “Where do you draw the line between which traits to include?” Carr said. “Because if you get into things like gender or social status, what’s to stop people from including more problematic things like race?”

Awad replied that the Moral Machine team included two psychologists and two anthropologists, who determined the attributes based on their inclusion in previous psychological studies in human decision-making.

Another fellow, Mićo Tatalović, asked about the Moral Machine’s algorithms: “Are you talking about programing them to match who you are and what your values are, or what you would like your values to be?”

Tatalović added that “in the teaching of a deep learning machine, you are also imparting your own biases into it, whether or not you’re aware of that or not. And so if you’re a racist, for instance, you are imparting into the AI machine that that is a clean slate to begin with, but you are also imparting your racist bias into it as well.”

Awad replied that the project aims “to promote the discussion about the kind of moral principles that should be considered in driverless cars. One goal was to collect data. The other goal is to continue a discussion, and that’s why we had part of the website where people could design their own moral dilemmas, and then they could see what other people design, and they could discuss that.”

Jane Qiu asked Awad about how the results of the study would be presented so they were not misinterpreted by legislators and used to directly inform driverless car policy.

Awad said the study was intended as the beginning of a discussion on decision-making in driverless cars, not the end of it. By gathering “evidence for human cognitive processes that are happening with respect to driverless cars,” he said, “then maybe policymakers could use it to determine what they should study more. This could be useful.”

On emerging technology like driverless cars, “there needs to be a common body of data,” said Fellow Joshua Hatch, “and a common way that everybody is looking at things. … What we really need to have is a collection of what are all the questions that we really need to ask.”

The discussion continued for half an hour beyond the scheduled seminar time. Afterward, Awad said: “It was the toughest audience I have ever presented to, but it was a great experience. I learned a lot from the comments and the suggestions, and I now better understand what concerns may arise, given the insightful questions.”

by Ashley Junger / December 7th 2017 / Fellowship Life

This Year’s Fellows: Rowan Jacobsen

“Once you’re a known author, everyone wants to pigeonhole you. I didn’t want to get pigeonholed.” Photo: Joshua Hatch.

This is the second in a series of profiles of the 2017-18 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Rowan Jacobsen has spent most of his career writing about food, particularly the sustainable food movement. From chocolate to apples to oysters, he has delved into the history and chemistry of what we eat, in such books as “The Essential Oyster,” “Apples of Uncommon Character,” and “American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields.” He has also written articles for a variety of outlets, including Outside, Vice, Mother Jones, and Orion Magazine.

While many people don’t see food as scientific, Jacobsen uses his readers’ innate interest in their appetite to explore a variety of science topics. “I did a book [‘Fruitless Fall’] about the honeybee collapse, so that was really a science book even though it was about our food supply,” he says. In melding food and science, Jacobsen became increasingly exposed to the expanding field of genetically modifying and engineering edible organisms.

Intrigued by scientists’ ability to create novel DNA sequences using raw genetic material, Jacobsen decided to pursue this topic outside of the traditional food lens. “Once you’re a known author, everyone wants to pigeonhole you,” he says, although he admits that food is not the worst genre to get stuck in. “I didn’t want to get pigeonholed.”

He pitched synthetic biology stories to a few of his editors. He soon realized that his interest in telling the nitty-gritty of gene editing and his editors’ interest in freak-out stories about “designer babies” didn’t line up. “I delivered the story, and they totally didn’t get it,” he recalls.

Jacobsen realized that he’d need to find a place where he was free to explain the technology and the story of synthetic biology in a way that people understood, and he’d need to understand it better himself. He applied for a Knight Science Journalism fellowship to give himself space to explore the topic in different ways. “That’s my goal while I’m here,” he says, “to try to understand it on a deeper level, and figure out how to tell that story to people who are not deeply immersed in it.”

Jacobsen is considering two possible areas for research during his fellowship: biohacking and reviving extinct smells. Biohackers are people who engage in gene editing and other types of biological modification despite working outside of institutions or labs. They intrigue Jacobsen because they are very countercultural, and “their relationship to biology and to DNA is kind of different.”

As for extinct smells, Jacobsen is interested in the “ghost perfume” project, in which a Boston company called Ginkgo BioWorks hopes to use genetic material from extinct flowers to replicate their scent genes.

Jacobsen knows that the things he is writing about, such as gene editing, can be disconcerting. “It scares people for really good reasons,” he says. “But it also is going to be the key to, I would say, probably most medical advances and probably other environmental advances as well.”

by KSJ@MIT / November 16th 2017 / KSJ News & Events

Encounters With the Unimaginably Powerful

A composite image from several telescopes of a spiral galaxy, NGC 4258. X-rays photographed by Chandra are in blue.

Our founding director, Victor McElheny, had this to say about the annual KSJ visit to the Chandra X-Ray Observatory:

“It’s a great Space Age story. In anonymous rooms on the seventh floor of One Hampshire Street, we met our old friend Claude Canizares, the modest, soft-spoken physicist who seeks out some of the extreme events in the universe, expressed in unimaginably powerful showers of X-rays. He has given decades of his career arguing for, building, and then guiding the use of a great tube for catching X-rays above the atmosphere. Wrapped in heat-handling foil, the tube excels in precisely locating the places in the cosmos from which the X-rays originate and what their intensity is. Orbiting the earth every 64 hours, experiencing few sunsets and operating for long stretches automatically, the Chandra satellite (named for the great Indian astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) watches for the birth and death of stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. It’s lasted far beyond its planned lifetime of five years and is part of a tiara of such observatories in space, sending down measurements not only in X-rays but also gamma rays, ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, each feeling, as Claude remarked, a different part of the elephant.

“Chandra is an example of the kind of celestial watchman that became possible only when we learned how to rocket objects into orbit some 60 years ago. So it’s actually something relatively new. But we can be sure that this activity will stretch far into the future. It’s a reminder to science writers that they are parts of a continuum, and that the things they cover will continue, inexorably, to grow more and more intriguing as they mature in what are likely to be very long careers. There is something solemn about it, like the tolling of the bell of a buoy marking a channel.”