Workshop summaries
Who defines disease, and who gets money to study cures?
At our August meeting we workshopped two draft opinion essays that, from different angles but from within the same field, raised fundamental questions about how we should describe and nurture scientific progress—in this case, in medicine. In our first text, a surgeon began with an anecdote about her mother to interrogate how illness is defined…
Read MoreUnconventional science lessons in health
Embracing uncertainty This tends to be an unconventional public stance for scientists these days, which could be why our first draft text this month felt so fresh when it began by doing just that. The author described working in science for most of their adult life, and having believed, in the past, that after putting…
Read MoreEthical dilemmas of genetic testing, and the history behind them
Imagine you are in a hospital lobby bustling with parents and noisy children, and then you take the elevator way up to a quiet prenatal diagnostics center, where no children have yet appeared. You are entering the world of to be born or not to be born. The future is now So began the beautifully…
Read MoreThe hypoxia of the sea & the silent hitman
The sensation of being unable to breathe had both literal and symbolic resonance in our texts this month. Of the two texts-in-progress we workshopped, one was an evocative memory of diving in the Baltic sea that conjured feverish dreams linked to the fate of the planet. The essay began with a diver floating on their…
Read MoreBringing opinion essays into being / The Chronic Migraine Chronicles
To welcome spring we kicked off an opinion-essay writing drive, then workshopped sections from a forthcoming memoir-and-science-guide for general readers about living with chronic migraines. Benefits of opinion-essay writing Opinion essays about science for the general public can appear in newspapers or blogs and have many advantages. Writing them forces us to clarify the social…
Read MoreIs life a battle?
The famous essayist Susan Sontag thoughtfully criticized militaristic metaphors for illnesses and medical science. Yet our participant draft texts this month both made compelling cases—in very different ways—that science maybe does involve fighting. Is battle an appropriate metaphorical framework when communicating about science? Morphogens fight it out The first text we workshopped, about how morphogens…
Read MoreCan extremophiles save the cat? Using “story grid”
Telling science stories can take the basic form of a “why / how / what” presentation, or the more ambitious form of a “story grid”, like the kind that bestselling writers use in nonfiction books, thrillers, and Hollywood films—one popular version is the “Save the Cat” technique of gridding out a story from 15 key…
Read MoreScientific genius—or not?
How do we as a society figure out if scientific genius is the real thing? What role should science writers play in celebrating or critiquing apparent scientific brilliance? What happens if we get it wrong? One of the most celebrated polymath geniuses of 20th-century America was the cosmologist/physicist/environmentalist/architect Buckminster Fuller. Yet doubts remain whether Fuller…
Read MoreBioracism reborn?
Many science bloggers and writers put their thoughts into the form of essays that discuss a new book, or several new books where the writer sees a theme. We studied an example of this kind of book-review essay this month to see how such essays can work, especially in terms of structure and argument. The…
Read MoreThe intersection of science and literature
We had a special treat at our dinner salon and workshop meeting this month: Iida Turpeinen, one of Finland’s leading thinkers and practitioners in the transdisciplinary space between science and literature, joined us to discuss a section of the forthcoming English translation of her 2023 natural-history book Beasts of the Sea (Fin. Elolliset), which won…
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