Translated material
BIG-MAK for the brain: tasty and without poison?
A few years ago, I happened to work at the 2011 Universal Conference of the 2011 World Conference. The program was led by a journalist from America Deborah Blum. She acted as a co -organizer of the event along with colleagues from Egypt.
Suddenly, the conference had to be transferred from the revolutionary Cairo to Dokhu (a city on the coast of the Persian Gulf, the capital of the Arab state of Qatar. - Ed. ), To solve a lot of financial, logistics and even delicate issues.
For example, representatives of the African continent demanded to include separate seminars from the “European” seminars in the program, and speakers from the Arab countries refused to sit in the same section with the Israelis. That experience gave me a clear idea of the exceptional organizational and communicative abilities of Deborah.
The Deborah Blum has Russian roots. Her grandmother lived somewhere near St. Petersburg and got to America in 1910 at a very young age. Deborah was born in 1954 in Illinois. At first she studied chemistry at the university, then received a journalist's diploma. This double education ultimately brought her to scientific journalism. She worked for 13 years in the Sacramento Bee newspaper, received in 1992 the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on ethical problems of primates research. In the wake of her publications, she published the book “The Monkey Wars”.
In 1997, Deborah began to teach journalism at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, continued to be published in various publications, to conduct blogs. She became the co-editor of the two collections of “The Field Guide for Science Writers” in 1997 and 2006, the president of the National Association of Scientific Writers of the United States, wrote several more popular science books: “Sex on the Bran”, “Love At Goon Park, Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life Inter Death.
Her last book, “The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York,” was published in 2010. It tells about the origin of forensic medicine in New York at the beginning of the 20th century. The Amazon online store included it in the top 100 of the most read documentaries of the year. In January 2014, the PBS TV channel shot a series for the book by American Experience on the basis of the book. In October, a collection under her editorship - “The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014” will be released. The name can be translated as "The best articles by American journalists about science and nature." And a year later, in July 2015, Deborah Blum will begin work at the Massachusetts Technological Institute as director of the internship program for scientific journalists - Knight Science Journalism at Mit. It seemed to me this is a good reason to ask her a few questions about books and profession.
- Deborah, please tell us about the collections of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, which are published every year in the United States. What is their meaning? What are the criteria for articles there?
- They began to publish a series in 2000. This is an anthology, the purpose of which is to highlight the outstanding work of scientific journalists and popularizers and try to attract public attention to them. After all, we often miss a lot of good stories, and by preparing such collections, we find them and give them a new life. There are no criteria for selecting articles. Each collection has its own editor, who collects it to its taste. Partly the reason is why the collections from year to year are different. The series has a editor - Tim Folger, who tracks the articles for a whole year. For the book of 2014, he sent me about 150 articles. I could replenish this list with the work that I liked, but he missed. So I added a dozen more, and then I formed a collection of 27 articles.
- What is inside this collection? Can you highlight some particularly interesting, important articles?
- In the preface to the book, I wrote that the best articles of scientific journalists allow us to see both choice and consequences. The author describes the path from the scientific discovery to often unexpected results. The collection has an article “The Great Forgetting” (“Great forgetfulness”) Nicholas Carra [1] , who investigated how the growing dependence on technology leads us to the loss of skills that we once relied on. For example, when we use GPS, we stop creating mental cards.
I will note the article by Marin McCan about the “plain -like future” [2] , where the abuse of drugs and resistance to antibiotics are linked. And I also like the article by Amy Harmon. She talks about a disease that destroys citrus cultures, and explores what our irrational fear of products from GMOs costs society [3] .
The collection includes many articles on the global change in climate and the movement of anti -producers. And there are several articles that were there simply because they are magnificent, such as, for example, the essay of Barbara Kingsolver about knitting and the flowers of seasons of the year, is pure poetry [4] .
-Have you noticed any changes in scientific journalism over the years?
- I think we began to avoid sensationality in the coverage of science, we are more aware that science is human activity and that people experience consequences from scientific results. As for the topics as climate change, I think we began to represent them less often in the light of only two points of view and more often more clearly clarify the essence, scientific consensus, which allows us to explain in the article in what way the climate changes.
- You were the president of the National Association of Scientific Writers (NASW) in 2003-2004. How has the association changed since then?
- When I was the president of NASW, we gathered for our annual meeting during the AAAS conference (American Association of Assistance to the Development of Science. - Approx. T.P. ), where we were given the premises. Then we decided that a professional journalistic organization should be independent of its sources. So we began to hold our annual conferences separately and focused on professional activities.
Now NASW has a three-day conference, where trainers and press conferences are held for the most important scientific problems. We publish the quarterly journal Science Writer and support grants by all types of projects that improve scientific journalism, for example, regional conferences. We plan grants for journalists who work on long -term projects.
- For the past twenty years at professional conferences, they must have been talking about the crisis and even the death of scientific journalism. First, bloggers were accused, then the fall of the prestige of science, PR managers are now to blame. Is there something real behind these apocalyptic moods?
- Well, as you noticed, people bury scientific journalism for twenty years, and she is all alive. But in the era of digital media - and this must be admitted - scientific journalism has evolved and continues to change. Many good articles on science are published in digital formats, and this can be seen in the anthology that I edited. There are articles from Nautilus, Medium, Pacific Standard - these are new digital magazines and platforms.
Traditional newspapers and magazines also develop modern forms of online historians, data analysis and visualization. So it depends on us that articles about science remain part of this changing journalistic environment. This is difficult, and at the same time wonderful that we have the opportunity to tell stories in a variety of ways.
- Let me congratulate you on a new interesting work as director of the internship program for scientific journalists at the Massachusetts Technological Institute. This year, the program will be the first participant from Russia - Olga Dobrovidova. But we have this program little known. Tell us about her.
- The wonderful news about Olga. I hope that we will have more participants from Russia, because KSJ is an excellent program. This is like a one -year creative vacation, which participants conduct at the MTI and Harvard, listen to lectures, attend seminars, go on excursions to the laboratory. There is a very cool excursion in the state of Maine, where interns live in the 19th century house and visit high -tech laboratories. They have many opportunities to have fun, meet people, and establish useful ties. The idea of the program is to give scientific journalists a chance to learn new things, think about the profession, make acquaintances around the world.
- Does the program need modernization? In which one?
- Yes, KSJ needs an update. The program still works largely on the model of newspapers of the 1980s. We are now considering many options for modernizing it: improve Ksjtracker (a blog dedicated to criticism of scientific journalism. - Approx. T.P. ), develop new educational resources, a new project of the internship program, updating the program for invited journalists (Visiting Fellows), and create new trainings for interns and journalists from the outside. This is now an outstanding program, and I hope to create new projects on its basis.
1. Www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgeting/309516
2. Https://medium.com/@fernnews/imagining-the-post-antibiotics-future-892b57499977
3. Www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orage-by-ites-its-dna.html?pagewanted=all
4. Www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7809
Deborae website Blum - http://deborahblum.com
The website of the National Association of Scientific Writers - www.nasw.org
The site of the internship program for scientific journalists in MIT - https://ksj.mit.edu