Knight Science Journalism @MIT

Science Journalism in the Public Interest

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

by / November 14th 2017 / KSJ News & Events

Got a Book in You? How to Find an Agent — and an Audience

Once a book is out, Mackenzie Brady Watson (below) comes back to the author to think about the future. “What could we do better, what could the publisher do better?” Photos: David Corcoran.

 

“Welcome to Book Publishing 101,” said Mackenzie Brady Watson, greeting the KSJ fellows for their Oct. 19 seminar.

As an agent with the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency in New York City, Watson has been through the entire publishing process dozens of times – from proposal to writing to release to marketing. She walked the fellows through an abridged version.

The first step is making the connection between author and agent. “I look at submissions or reach out to people that I’m interested in,” said Watson. “Often, they come to me via a referral, or a query letter, then sometimes I’m reading material out on the web. I spend a lot of time on Twitter just kind of trolling around.”

Before entering the literary world, Watson was a microbiology researcher, so proposals for nonfiction science books tend to catch her eye, especially if they are historically driven. When she feels excited about ideas, and feels the same excitement from authors, she will offer to represent them.

Together, she and the author will develop a full proposal to pitch to publishing houses. Finding the right publisher is a big decision, and there are a number of factors to consider:

“Do I think the publishing house is good at publishing that kind of book? … Do they have the biggest heavy hitters in that genre? It may not have as much room for you, or if you’re going to be the star, they may not have as much expertise. … Does this feel like the right home?”

Once the author has settled on a publisher, Watson negotiates the contract language and handles the business paperwork, so the author can focus on writing the book.

“After there is a final manuscript, when all edits are done,” Watson said, “that’s when the publication machine really kicks in.” From there “it’s usually about a year” (sometimes longer, sometimes shorter) to publication.

Before the book hits store shelves, Watson said, she is “thinking of publicity and marketing ideas, talking to the author about potential essays and op-eds,” to make sure the release makes the biggest splash possible in what has become a very crowded pool.

“There are so many books in the last year that just lost out on so much media because the media cycle right now is absolutely insane,” said Watson. “So if there are ways to tie your book into the news, even if your book is on a subject adjacent to something that’s going on in the news, or if there’s some sort of parallel that you can draw, that’s really important.”

Watson was Margot Lee Shetterly’s literary agent for “Hidden Figures,” about the African-American women who served as mathematicians for NASA during the space race. It became a best seller and a hit movie.

“‘Hidden Figures’ came out in a particularly wonderful moment,” Watson said, “because you had so many groups that were geared toward getting women and people of color in STEM fields that held up this book and were like, ‘This is the best thing.’”

Once the book is out and publicity is winding down, Watson comes back to the author to think about the future. “What could we do better, what could the publisher do better?”

“Do we want to stay with this publisher, do we want to try to find a different place? What did they do well, what might you like differently?”

Then comes the next book, if all goes well, and the process starts all over again.

KSJ Fellow Teresa Carr asked Watson what she looks for in a book proposal. Watson replied that every proposal begins with an overview of the project (“What is this book about? Why should you be writing it?”), then a sample chapter, followed by an outline of the book’s overall structure.

After those sections, said Watson, “you want to include a few things that are more personal, what you like, where you grew up, if you have a dog … little things to remind the editor that you’re human. I also really like to include pictures, because again, you’re seeing this person’s face. You’re remembering that they are a person behind these pages.”

It’s also important to draw comparisons between the book you are proposing and other recent successful titles. “You want to look at books that were well reviewed, award winners or best sellers, ones that you saw on a lot of ‘best of year’ lists,” Watson said, adding, “You’d never want to use a book that sold 10 copies and be like, ‘Mine’s like this one.’”

Another fellow, Jane Qiu, asked Watson if certain agencies and agents focus on particular kinds of books, and how authors can figure out the best place to pitch their book.

“The way you can figure that out is actually by reverse engineering,” said Watson. “If there is a book that you really admire … look at the acknowledgements section at the back of the book, because they almost always thank their agent.”

Some editors who are “really, really hungry” for certain topics will look for them with a Twitter hashtag, like #MSWL, for Manuscript Wish List. “Editors and agents will use that,” Watson said, “to be like, ‘I really want a history of architecture, I really want a science book about clownfish.’”

by / October 30th 2017 / KSJ News & Events

Venturing Inside the Genome: Feng Zhang on the Promise of CRISPR

Feng Zhang, right, answers a question from KSJ Fellow Sujata Gupta, foreground. Listening, from left: Ehsan Masood, Alison Frank, Mico Tatalovic. Photo: Timothy James Dimacali.

 

Few acronyms roll off the tongue as easily as CRISPR — and that’s a good thing, since the name of this gene-editing tool is spoken a lot. It gives researchers an unprecedented ability to turn genes on and off, as well as insert new genes into DNA strands. Behind the catchy name and the near-deafening buzz surrounding the technology, CRISPR also has the potential to help scientists understand sections of the human genome whose roles are still unknown.

For their October 3 seminar, the KSJ fellows took a field trip to one of the institutions pioneering the use of CRISPR in biomedical research, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, just across Main Street from campus. Over pizza and beer in a conference room hung with heavy yellow fabric (“We’re still working on getting this room un-mustarded,” said Lee McGuire, Broad’s chief communications officer), the fellows learned about CRISPR from three members of the Feng Zhang Laboratory.

Vanessa Verdine, a research associate, began the presentations with a “CRISPR Crash Course” detailing, among other things, what the name stands for (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), where it comes from (bacterial genomes, a system used to adapt and gain resistance to intruders), and how a number of genes often accompany CRISPR sequences in bacterial DNA; they are known as CRISPR-associated, or “Cas,” genes.

Verdine said that one technique the Zhang lab has been investigating is the use of the Cas 9 protein to “knock out” certain sequences of the genome by making precise cuts in spots along a DNA or RNA strand. In a process called screening, Cas9 can be tuned to knock out a number of genes that researchers suspect are responsible for biological functions. As the DNA replicates, the biologists can monitor how the knockout screen affected an organism’s biology. “Cas9 is just a small slice of CRISPR,” said Verdine. “There are still lots of useful proteins yet to be discovered.”

Julia Joung, an MIT graduate student and researcher in the Zhang lab, presented another application of Cas9: identifying the roles of non-coding sections of the human genome. “These DNA and RNA sections were long considered to be junk, since they do not code proteins that are used in the body,” she said. “But they do other things in the cell.” Using Cas9 to screen and compare sections of long non-coding RNAs or lncRNA (pronounced link RNA), Joung and her team were able to discover that certain sequences help cancerous skin cells resist a common drug treatment. The study was recently published in Nature.

After the presentations, the lab’s director, Feng Zhang — core institute member at Broad, investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and MIT professor of neuroscience and biological engineering — fielded questions from the fellows about the work’s potential.

“There’s so much we don’t know … and so much we don’t know that we don’t know,” he replied. “The genome is so vast, and each thing in the genome might influence many others, so the permutations are in the millions. We could find gene circuits that work together … circuits that influence immunity to disease, circadian rhythm ….”

by / October 26th 2017 / KSJ News & Events

FOIA Got You Down? Michael Morisy and MuckRock Can Help

Michael Morisy and his colleagues have filed nearly 40,000 public records requests with more than 8,000 agencies. Photo: David Corcoran.

 

“Who’s filed a public records request before?” Michael Morisy, the founder of the investigative journalism site MuckRock, asked the KSJ fellows to kick off their Sept. 21 seminar.

About half of the 10 fellows raised their hands. Taking a quick sip from his energy drink, Morisy asked a follow-up: “For whoever filed a public records request, did it go really, really well?”

The group laughed knowingly as almost all hands descended, with a couple remaining half-raised and wavering in the classic “so-so” gesture.

The Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, grants U.S. citizens the right to request information from the federal government. All 50 state governments have their own flavor of FOIA. But the process is notoriously slow and convoluted. The first three times he requested records as a young reporter, Morisy said, “they basically told me to bug off, and they’re not going to give me anything.”

But that didn’t discourage him, because many of the most powerful stories he read were built around information from public records requests. After interviewing more than 100 journalists across the country and finding that they shared his frustrations, Morisy founded MuckRock in 2010 with the web developer Mitchell Kotler. “We said: ‘What if we build a website that just makes FOIA as it should be? Then we’ll take care of all the messy back-end stuff and manage that process for people,’” said Morisy.

MuckRock will “even follow up with agencies,” he went on. “We’ll make sure they get the documents to come back. We’ll digitize them for you if the agency responds with paper. … We track the whole process from start to finish.”

Morisy and his colleagues have filed nearly 40,000 public records requests with more than 8,000 different agencies, and released more than 1.6 million pages to the public. Generally, when a request is fulfilled, MuckRock will immediately post the documents for public use on its website, but Morisy said exceptions can be made for journalists so they aren’t scooped before their story is published.

He offered the fellows some general advice for filing FOIA requests — with or without MuckRock. “Try to think like a FOIA officer,” he said. “They get in at 9, they want to leave at 5. They have metrics they want to hit … and so if you work with them, if you meet them halfway, they are going to do what they can to try to move your request along.”

Being as specific as possible about the location and time-stamps of documents can be very helpful, as can contacting the FOIA officer over the phone. Officials must also provide an expected completion date for all requests, so holding them to it and following up frequently can speed up the process.

Running a website to bring government information to the public comes with a unique set of challenges. “We’ve had agencies threaten to sue us,” said Morisy. “We’ve had agencies file cease-and-desist orders with us. We’ve gotten sued by companies over documents we’ve released. We’ve been threatened with jail.”

Deborah Blum, KSJ’s director, asked about another challenge in the current political climate: the trend of government agencies to withhold information that ought to be public. Morisy replied that agencies’ overall attitude about releasing data — whether through FOIA requests or on their own initiative — is getting worse. But he added that FOIA officers themselves “are more committed now than ever to their job.”

KSJ Fellow Joshua Hatch asked Morisy if he had had any trouble getting documents like emails from officials who were potentially admitting to their own wrongdoing. “Sometimes people do stuff they shouldn’t,” he replied. “I’m amazed how often people release stuff that is directly incriminating of them.”

Another fellow, Kolawole Talabi, from Nigeria, noted that “investigative journalism cuts across international borders,” and asked, “Do you have partners outside of the U.S. or an international network with your organization?” Morisy replied that MuckRock is part of the International Center for Journalists and is “close friends” with Alaveteli, a platform that helps citizens request government documents in over 20 countries.

“And then there are some people working on taking our platform and taking it into other countries,” said Morisy. “We’re happy to help people who are interested in doing that, too.”

by / October 10th 2017 / KSJ News & Events

Uncertainty Is No Excuse: Gernot Wagner on Climate Engineering

“It’s the stuff that we don’t know that’s much, much worse than the stuff we do know,” Gernot Wagner told the KSJ fellows. Photo: David Corcoran.

 

When it comes to climate change, says Gernot Wagner, “uncertainty” is a powerful word. It just doesn’t mean what people think it does.

The economist, author, and co-director of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program says too many policymakers have framed climate change as a matter of uncertainty, rather than risk.

“One of the primary responses by those not wanting to do sensible climate policy is ‘Oh, we don’t know enough!’” he told the Knight Science Journalism fellows on Sept. 26, adding: “With uncertainty, people tend to say, ‘Oh, let’s wait and see. We need to do more research.’”

But it’s precisely this uncertainty, he said, that should shock people into action. That is the main contention of the 2015 book “Climate Shock,” which he wrote with Martin Weitzman, an environmental economics professor at Harvard.

“It’s the stuff that we don’t know that’s much, much worse than the stuff we do know.”

By current estimates, global temperatures will rise 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius within this century, largely because of our continued production of carbon. Here, Wagner is quick to point out a couple of things: that climate change is inescapable, and that there is still a chance it may be worse than we expect.

“This is scary enough, of course. The averages are bad enough. But there is a non-zero probability” of a much greater rise, he warned: 6 degrees Celsius or more. “The probability of that happening should really prompt us into action.”

But as with an overflowing bathtub, the solution isn’t as straightforward as simply minimizing our carbon emissions. You can’t just turn off the tap, Wagner said; you need to unclog the drain too.

Completely shutting down carbon emissions would pull down global temperatures in the long term but would also eliminate sulfur dioxide — which, in turn, would cause a global temperature spike “within weeks.”

“Sulfur dioxide is basically tiny reflective particles,” he explained. “The fact that it’s tiny is bad because kids breathe it and die from asthma as a result, but the fact that they’re reflective means that they’re cooling what’s underneath — the albedo effect.”

And that’s where his Solar Geoengineering Research Program comes in. The goal of the $8 million project is to study the effects of interventions “to make the planet more reflective,” from painting roofs white to ambitious proposals like seeding the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide using specially modified airplanes flying round the clock. (The initiative is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Open Philanthropy Project, the Pritzker Innovation Fund, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the VoLo Foundation, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.)

“Volcanoes have been doing it forever,” Wagner said, pointing out that the explosion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 temporarily caused global temperatures to drop by half a degree, the total average global warming up to that point.

Wagner admits that he has his job cut out for him: It’s his responsibility to look at the social impact of geoengineering.

“My part in this is the social science,” he said. “What is the interaction of even just talking about mitigation? In so many ways, it’s the bigger impact … the impact of even just talking about researching the topic on people’s desire to cut emissions in the first place.”

KSJ Fellow Mićo Tatalović said he was struck by “the idea that so few of us consider the consequences of the upper end of global warming … and it looks like global warming might well be worse than our early models have predicted.” Geoengineering, he added, “will have planetary consequences — for better or worse.”

by / August 8th 2017 / Announcements

Announcing the Class of 2017-18

 

The Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
is pleased to announce that 10 elite science journalists from four countries have been selected as fellows for the 2017-18 academic year. The KSJ@MIT program, entering its 35th year, brings a selection of the world’s finest journalists to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for an academic year of study, intellectual growth, and exploration at MIT, Harvard, and other institutions in greater Boston.

KSJ@MIT, supported by a generous endowment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is recognized around the world as the premier mid-career fellowship program for science writers, editors, and multimedia journalists, and as publisher of the award-winning digital magazine Undark. Since its founding in 1983, it has hosted more than 300 fellows representing media outlets from The New York Times to Le Monde, from CNN to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

With support from the program, fellows pursue an academic year of independent study, augmented by twice-weekly science-focused seminars taught by some of the world’s leading scientists and storytellers, as well as a variety of rotating, skills-focused master classes and workshops. The goal: Fostering professional growth among the world’s small but essential community of journalists covering science and technology, and encouraging them to pursue that mission, first and foremost, in the public interest.

We are proud to introduce the 2017-18 class of KSJ fellows:

Teresa Carr is a senior content editor for Consumer Reports and an award-winning investigative reporter, focusing on consumer and public health issues. Recently she has been investigating the pharmaceutical industry, with an emphasis on the costs of pain management and addiction. Last year she received the Folio Award, for articles on the antibiotic crisis, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Magazine Journalism.

Caty Enders is series editor for The Guardian’s U.S. edition, based in New York, where she edits features, analysis, and multimedia projects on environment, health, and technology. She has been the supervising producer for The Guardian’s U.S. podcasts. She previously worked as managing online editor for Outside magazine and as a freelance radio producer and writer for outlets from “All Things Considered” to Esquire.

Sujata Gupta is a freelance journalist based in Vermont, whose writing focuses on issues related to food, ecology, and health. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, National Public Radio, Nature, High Country News, Discover, Scientific American, Wired, and NovaNext. She has taught journalism at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Previously, she worked as a reporter and editor at various newspapers and spent several years as a National Park ranger.

Joshua Hatch is the assistant editor for data and interactives at The Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, where he oversees a team of database reporters and designers. He is president of the Online News Association. Previously he was interactives director at USA Today. He teaches online and data journalism in the graduate journalism program at American University.

Rowan Jacobsen is a freelance science journalist and the author of seven books exploring a wide range of environmental issues, most recently “The Essential Oyster.” He is based in Vermont and has written for a broad array of publications, including Harper’s, Outside, Mother Jones, and Pacific Standard. His work has been featured in “Best American Science and Nature Writing” and has received numerous awards.

Ehsan Masood is the editor of Research Fortnight, a science policy magazine based in London, and the author of several books, including “The Great Invention: The Story of GDP and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern World” (2016). He has worked as a writer and editor at Nature and New Scientist, and has made documentaries for BBC radio. He teaches a course on science and innovation policy at Imperial College London.

Jane Qiu is a globe-trotting freelance science journalist based in Beijing, and a regular contributor to publications including Nature, Science, Scientific American, and The Economist. Her work has focused on environmental and cultural issues, with a particular interest in the Third Pole countries of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas. Her writing awards include recognition from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Asian Environmental Journalism Awards.

Kolawole Talabi is a freelance science writer based in Nigeria and a regular contributor to Mongabay.com. He’s received numerous awards for investigative reporting, on issues ranging from treatment of infectious disease in Africa to endangered natural resources. Last year he was one of five writers honored with the Next Generation of Science Journalists award, given by the World Health Summit in Germany.

Mićo Tatalović is editor of New Scientist’s environment and life sciences news section. A native of Croatia, he is now based in London, overseeing a team of staff writers and freelancers. He previously worked on the news desk of SciDev.net, helping to coordinate a global network of science journalists reporting from South America, Africa, and Asia, as well as freelancing for wide range of science magazines. He is chairman of the Association of British Science Writers, and sits on the board of the Balkan Network of Science Writers.

Caroline Winter is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York, focusing on science, technology, and medicine. A native of Germany, she previously worked as a freelancer for publications ranging from Spiegel International to The New York Times Magazine. She was a Fulbright fellow in 2008-09 and worked in Berlin, researching, writing, and translating stories.

by / May 31st 2017 / KSJ News & Events

For the Class of 2016-17, a Few Last Acts

After graduation, a group portrait under the dome. From left: Fabio Turone, Chloé Hecketsweiler, Mark Wolverton, Robert McClure, Iván Carrillo, Maura O’Connor, Meera Subramanian, Bianca Vázquez Toness, Lauren M. Whaley, Rosalia Omungo. Photo: Bettina Urcuioli.

It was almost their final act.

To conclude the second semester on May 16 and 18 — just before a graduation-week gala that included a presidential diploma ceremony, a farewell dinner, and an outing to Fenway Park — each of the 10 fellows in KSJ’s Class of 2016-17 gave a half-hour “Showcase” presentation of highlights from the year in Cambridge. And the final showcase was a one-act play.

Monster (Sally Deneen), laughing evilly to Mark Wolverton: “We’ll see, Chuckles! We’ll see.” Photo: Fabio Turone.

Titled “The Fellows Are Due on Ames Street,” it was Mark Wolverton’s “Twilight Zone” take on the fellowship year, a surreal travelogue through the corridors of MIT and Harvard — with stops on Boston’s T and on Election Night (talk about surreal), advice from professors and from every fellow, and frequent visits from a Monster embodying Mark’s book deadline. (In the role of the Monster, the scenery-chewing Sally Deneen brought down the house.)

You can watch Mark’s play here. And while it may have been the most uproarious showcase offering, the other nine were just as distinctive. Robert McClure cooked and served medieval food — spiced meatballs and “wardonys in syrup” (pears poached in spiced red wine). The recipes arose from an MIT history course he’d found via typical KSJ serendipity: He met the instructor while doing “vox pop” interviews for Ibby Caputo’s audio workshop early in the first semester.

Iván Carrillo with Gonzalo at Fenway. Photo: Lauren M. Whaley.

There were videos and photo essays. During a KSJ statistics workshop between semesters, Fabio Turone grew fascinated by the work of an instructor with profound hearing loss who teaches statistics at Gallaudet University; that fascination led to a documentary about developing sign language for teaching statistical concepts to the deaf. Another documentary grew out of a chance encounter between Rosalia Omungo and Bouba Diemé, a young man she met in a global development course at the Harvard Kennedy School. She wanted to know what he was carrying around in the large box slung from his shoulder; it turned out to be a machine that was keeping his heart pumping. Iván Carrillo spent two semesters researching and filming the story of Marisol Robles, a friend from Mexico with kidney failure who began keeping an online journal after a failed transplant operation. Ultimately, she received a successful transplant thanks to a pioneering global exchange system developed by a transplant surgeon and a Nobel Prize-winning economist. The resulting videos — Fabio’s “Statistics in 4D” (to be published in Undark), Rosalia’s “My Heart Mate,” and Iván’s “Journal of Thirst” — brought tears to at least one viewer’s eyes.

Bianca Vázquez Toness and MIT President L. Rafael Reif share a diploma moment. Photo: Chloé Hecketsweiler.

As did Bianca Vázquez Toness’s “Moth”-style narrative — developed for of a course in personal storytelling — about a New Delhi medical drama involving her 2-month-old son’s hospitalization for pneumonia. That drama ended happily; not so the story of another mother whom she met in the hospital, who lost a daughter to pneumonia. “Now he’s 19 months old, fat, and happy,” Bianca said of her son, “and I rock him every chance I get.”

Meera Subramanian, a book author who decided to stretch herself this year by taking courses in photojournalism and “short-attention-span documentaries,” showed two films: “The Prophetess of Roxbury Crossing,” a photo essay, with lyrical voiceover narration, about a 59-year-old “lady of God” juggling the demands of church, community, and an extended family; and “100 Days of Anger & Angels,” about a Cape Cod artist’s delightfully subversive venture into fake news, supermarket-tabloid division.

Chloé Hecketsweiler, another writer eager to branch out into photojournalism, arranged to spend a month embedded in a lab at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute where researchers are looking for ways to turn embryonic stem cells into the pancreatic cells that make insulin. The resulting photo essay was published in Undark. Among its lessons, she said, was a scientific truth “you won’t read in Nature”: that research has a human face, often blemished with “uncertainties and dead ends, silly mistakes and unknown errors.” But what shines through the essay is dedication; the experiments, one researcher told her, “are like our babies.”

Lauren M. Whaley’s son, Malcolm, at play in preschool. Photo: Lauren.

Freed by the fellowship from the grind of covering the fine points of the Affordable Care Act and managing a constant tangle of wires as a multimedia journalist, Lauren M. Whaley delved deeply into a health-care story that gets too little attention: maternal mortality. With inspiration from the Harvard sociologist David Williams, who studies racism and health, and Gene Declercq, a B.U. professor of community health sciences who specializes in childbirth, she developed a strong case that the United States is falling far behind other advanced nations in safeguarding women — especially African-Americans — during pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood. As a coda to her sobering presentation, Lauren shared images from her months-long personal photography project documenting daily life in her son’s play-based preschool classroom.

Maura O’Connor’s second book is tentatively titled “Wayfinding: Mysteries of Navigation in the Age of GPS,” and she promised that by the time she was done, we’d think twice before ever again using a smartphone to get from Point A to Points B, C, and D. Promise kept: Maura’s research makes a convincing case that the ability to navigate is as integral to human functioning as memory itself — and that overreliance on gadgets like GPS might have diminishing effects on the small, seahorse-shaped organ called the hippocampus, essential in the formation of memory. A shrunken hippocampus, Maura warned, is associated not just with impaired spatial memory but with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. And that led her to several pieces of advice that could apply not only to hippocampal health but to life in general, and maybe even to a future class of KSJ fellows:

Try using a compass to orient yourself (Maura wears one on her wrist). Focus your powers of deduction on the natural world. All children — and adults, too? — need unmonitored free play outdoors. And finally: To build new cognitive maps, don’t be afraid of exploring new places.

And a last laugh.