How I Made it as a Science Writer

I was planning to begin writing about hard science with all its rules and abstractions.

It was frankly a necessity. Freelancing was tough, so in an effort to keep financially afloat, I had applied to write for a technical journal for oncologists. To my surprise, I got a call from the editor asking me to cover the forbidding-sounding American Society of Hematology meeting, or ASH for short.

When I got to the convention center, I pushed my way through the crowds and headed toward an auditorium where noted Stanford University scientist Margaret Shipp, MD, was to speak. The auditorium was already full when I got there, so I had to take a seat at the back. Dr. Shipp was already speaking, and as I looked at the slides of lymphoma cells above me on a TV monitor, and listened to Dr. Shipp talk about "gene expression profiling" and "ras signaling." I knew I was lost. I didn't understand a thing this scientist was saying, and my self-confidence began to crumble.

"I'll never be able to do this assignment," I said to myself, panicked. If I didn't get the payment for the 12 stories I had been assigned, I couldn't pay my mortgage. I nervously changed the tape in my recorder as Dr. Shipp was speaking, and one of my plastic tape holders fell to the floor with a clatter. A man next to me in a tight grey suit jacket inched away from me on his chair.

The following few days were a blur of seminars, one after the other. At one presentation, a crowd gathered around a poster hanging on a bulletin board in the convention center. A journalist crouched before the poster and feverishly shot photos. The scientists who had done the study outlined in the poster stood in formal black and navy blue suits, surrounded by people asking questions. But I looked at the bulletin board in disgust. I could tell this research paper was about Aranesp, a drug for the anemia that is a side effect of chemotherapy, but I couldn't decipher anything else.

I wandered away, depressed, sure that I couldn't do this assignment. When I got home, and listened to my tapes of the meeting seminar, I still didn't understand them. What on earth would I do?

That night, my husband persuaded me to forget my troubles at a movie. My husband was a science buff, who religiously watched Nova, and he had been aching to see a science documentary called Me and Isaac Newton. Once in the theater, I found to my surprise, that I was caught up in the stories of the seven scientists profiled in the film.

There was a physicist, a woman who built robots, a biologist who worked in the forests of Madagascar, even a cancer surgeon from England. But it was not the doctor who treated cancer patients whose story drew me in, but the lives of the physicist, working on abstract theorems, and the biologist living in a lemur preserve.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku built an atom smasher in his garage as a child, and has since devoted his life to completing Albert Einstein's unfinished "theory of everything." When he gets stuck in his calculations, he said, looking into the camera, he goes ice skating. "It's just me and Isaac Newton, skating on the ice," he said. "His rules have been understood for 300 years. I don't have to bat my brains against black holes, quantum theory and the big bang. It's just me and Isaac Newton, free of all the constraints I had before," he said. Then he spun and cut his skates deftly into the ice.

Kaku had a clear love of physics, and took joy in teaching it to his students. But New York housewife turned scientist Patricia Wright also exhibited a sense of wonder about science. She started out by buying an owl monkey as a pet, and her curiosity piqued, began to study these animals in science textbooks. For her work in finding a new species of monkey in Madagaskar, she was awarded a prestigious scientific prize, the MacArthur fellowship-"the genius award"--and she used the money she received to help save the rainforests of her adopted country. The forests were threatened by clear-cutting. The money she won went into establishing a section of the rainforest as a national preserve.

When my husband and I emerged from the theater, we both had the satisfied feeling that can only come from a good film. We clasped hands and I said, "You know, I can't give up. I have to try writing those science articles." I was inspired by the stories of the scientists in the film, and wanted to follow their lead.

The next day as I was flipping through my notes in my office, the face of 4-year-old Joshua Genert came into my mind. Several months ago I had met Joshua while doing a story on childhood leukemia for a magazine for cancer patients. A happy-go-lucky boy-except when he had to go to the hospital-he had received intensive chemotherapy since the age of one.

"These last few years have been an emotional roller coaster ride," his mother Trudi told me, her voice choking with emotion.

The day that I spent with Joshua was his last session of chemotherapy, as well as his birthday. Nurses wheeled in a big birthday cake on a cart covered in icing of his favorite color-blue. He pointed proudly to the chemotherapy "port" inserted in his chest, where the nurses attached chemotherapy lines. "I'm getting this off today," he said with joy.

As I thought about Joshua, the ASH meeting began to have a human face. The research I was reporting on might eventually mean better medicines and longer lives for people like Joshua with leukemia and other cancers.

It was also an intellectual and emotional challenge for me-- to meet and overcome my fear of not being "good enough" at dealing with abstract science. "Uncharted territory," Kaku had said in the film, "is the only one worth going into." Suddenly, covering the hematology meeting began to make sense to me.

That was when I concocted my plan. I would hunt down the scientists who had spoken at the ASH seminars and ask for their help. Not all of them would be angry if I asked stupid questions, I thought.

The first call I made was to a scientist in Australia who had helped design the trial on Aranesp. It took me three tries before I reached him at a decent time in Australia. To my surprise, he sounded quite easygoing. He explained to me that Aranesp was an anemia drug that could be given without the frequent injections required by other drugs, and dreaded by cancer patients. But it was just as effective, according to his study. Behind his voice I sensed a deep caring for the patients he treated-- patients who had been dropped like shipwrecked survivors in a land of toxic cancer and chemotherapy.

Next I called his fellow scientist in Los Angeles who had also studied Aranesp, but he was brusque and angry on the phone. He answered my questions with monosyllables. Finally, he exclaimed: "The bottom line is that Aranesp works." I was discouraged by his forbidding tone. "Well, that's all the questions I have," I said brightly, and hung up the phone quickly.

Two other scientists I called were painstaking in their explanations, and helped me understand how hematology drugs work. One drug, for instance, called Bexxar, is a manufactured protein that hones in like a guided missile to find cancer cells and kill them, without touching normal cells. A radioactive isotope attached to the protein helps it zero in on the cancer cell, and gives it more killing power.

I faced a petrifying moment when I contacted Dr. Margaret Shipp. On my first phone call, she came immediately to the phone, and her voice was warm and assured. As it turned out, she was studying the genetic make-up of different lymphomas, a type of blood cancer. This kind of research is just now enabling oncologists to distinguish very aggressive cancers from those that are more curable by looking at the genetic make-up of cancer cells-lymphoma cells for examples. A cell's genetic code-or the presence of certain proteins--can often make it more likely to spread.

The result of this research is that doctors can make better choices about the best treatments for their patients. So if a patient's cancer has a protein that has been shown to result in more aggressive cancers, doctors will often use more powerful therapies at the outset of treatment.

It was then that I found that I could understand the words on my tape recorder. I felt that the scientists I interviewed had given me the key to open a stubborn, rusty lock. In the course of several weeks, I wrote all 12 stories.

A few months later, I received the journal in the mail. There were my stories, complete, showing the world that I was someone who understood-at least halfway-the principles of science.

A few days later I was sitting at my computer when I got a note from the journal editor in my e-mail. "I'm sorry it's taken me so long to assign you your next story," she said. "But I was busy finding stories for the other writers I work with who aren't as comfortable as you are with technical material."

I clicked off the computer. It seemed I had arrived, I thought. I was finally a real science writer.