UCSC Science Notes: Newbies get to write their brains out…
Rob Irion is director of UC Santa Cruz’s Science Communications program that, in one short year turns well-trained, usually-young scientists into science writers. It has a success rate such that, in the last 30 years, banana slugs (school mascot) have become mainstays of the business. He sent us this year’s edition of the annual end-of-term magazine Science Notes that his flocks turn out. Illus is solid and imaginative, the product of students at the science illustration program at nearby Cal State University-Monterey, a new home for what was once, too, at UC Santa Cruz.
I got an ah-moment right off, reading through the very first piece. It is by Jane Palmer, called Cultivating Autism. She profiles a scientist and explains his difficult research. He is cultivating induced pluripotent stem cells, or ips, derived from the skin cells of people with autism. One goal, largely in hand, is to coax them into becoming neurons. Ahead, it is hoped, will come discovery of misbehavior in these ersatz snippets of brain that might provide clues to whether, and which, genes are the reason for the malady. This story, like others in the collection, is at bottom an exercise in craft, not news coverage. Inevitably they tend to concern work that has not yet had any great impact nor any assurance it will have much. So it goes when hunting up feature topics for a student magazine and to satisfy a class requirement – a good story of uncertain meaning outside its own arc is surely the norm.
The ah ha moment came, part way through. I recalled just reading in The New Yorker a piece by Peter Boyer on Francis Collins at NIH. That one addresses the reason for and aftermath of that recent federal judge decision to rescind the Obama administration’s loosened rules on federal money and research with human embryonic stem cells. Boyer’s story is conventional, if slight cross-grained, journalism with its topic things that matter and are in the news. Suddenly Palmer’s story became highly illuminating. In Science Notes is the backdrop story – an example of the legions of other researchers, pursuing elusive payoffs in basic research, who depend for research dollars on the sorts of decisions Boyer looks at from aside the seats of authority. Of course, ips cells are not human embryonic cells. But it all in a flash cohered for me as a single enterprise.
I skimmed through the whole lot in Science Notes, watching videos of a strange flying turbo-wing thing machine, learning from a remarkably even-handed, sober review of brown apple moth science and politics, marveling at the connection between twinkles in stars and images of the insides of living cells, and wondering about the fighting zeal of Weddell Seals that can also schlump happily around the lab without biting anybody, and more. There are many ah ha moments in there.
Don’t miss: the self-bios of the authors and illustrators at the bottoms of the pieces. Good luck to them all.
- Charlie Petit
