Of all the things I could do with my life, writing about science would have to top the list. Could there possibly be a better subject to write about? Science is fascinating in all its many flavors. It unravels mysteries like a sleuth, elucidating the workings of the universe, and always provides the promise of greater things to come (e.g. never-ending, substantive sequels). What more could a writer ask for?

Yet, as a science student, I also came to love field biology. I adored going out into the field, getting wet, muddy and cold while collecting, observing and measuring just about anything, anywhere, at any time. I always have. Even as a small child, I would sprawl out on the lawn in our backyard watching rows of ants marching back and forth along a concrete garden edging, noting the differences in ants, in what they were carrying, and how they reacted when they met. Field biology is in my blood.

But so is writing. After watching the ants, I wrote up my findings (I must have been all of eight years old - you can ask my mom) and sent them off to the peer-reviewed journal of the pre-teen set: Ranger Rick. I watched the mail for days, waiting for a reply. I was so hopeful that they would print my letter in the magazine; it was a great disappointment when no reply ever came. That was my first attempt at science writing, and I think I took my first "rejection" pretty well, all things considered.

It's really no surprise, then, that I would take on a senior thesis investigating science communication. I could easily have chosen a more traditional scientific project for my senior thesis, like almost all of my peers and those that had graduated from the Institute for Earth Systems Science & Policy before me. But no, I decided to follow the literary dictates of my ‘inner child' instead.

What did surprise me was how very difficult this project was. It was not easy, bridging the gap between the worlds of science and literature. Science has a distinctive mindset, even across the disciplines - its own sub-cultures, its own ideals, tenets and laws. So does the world of literature. Communicating science involves using methods and talents from both worlds, applied in different ratios depending on the situation; knowing just what to do given a particular situation was not always intuitive.

I was driven by my concern over the obvious split between scientists and non-scientists. Friends of mine who wrote for the campus newspaper, who were for the most part non-scientists, gave me a bad time about my predilection for biology. They'd roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders when I tried to explain some new and, I thought, fascinating discovery. Yet, they really liked my science articles. What a contradiction! The way I wrote about science for a broad audience was evidently somewhat different from the way they identified with it on a personal level. What was it that so offended non-scientists about the workings of science?

As a science major, I was trained to avoid writing reports in the flowery language of storytellers and poets, lest my words be thought a cover-up for faulty arguments. Yet I found in my career as a university newspaper writer that to catch the public's attention, I had to tell a story, I needed to avoid technical language and jargon. Science can seem so foreign, so unreal, to non-scientists; it can be particularly loathsome when it is precisely pinned out, like a dissected frog.

Putting forth science in a more technical format, one more comfortable for the scientist, sometimes fails to reach a wide section of the scientific community, let alone the general populace, as noted by Pulitzer prize-winning biologist Jared Diamond:

" I opened a recent issue of Science and arbitrarily chose an article halfway through the magazine's 15 research reports. The table of contents gives the title: "Activation of SAPK/JNK by TNF Receptor I through a Noncytotoxic TRAF2- Dependent Pathway". In the entire title, noncytotoxic is my sole clue as to the subject of the article.... hence, I am now confident that the field within which the article's subject falls isn't physics or psychology but cell biology. Since I have been a professional biologist for 39 years and my research includes cell biology, I am much more likely to be the article's intended reader than most other scientists. Nevertheless, I have never heard of SAPK, JNK, TNF TRAF2, or their receptors or pathways, so I have not the faintest idea what the article is about.¹"

As I mentioned, it was not easy. Even when I thought I had a good science writing technique down, I was informed that I still had elaborated too much, had put numbers in where numbers weren't necessary - I had even explained things that I didn't need to discuss! These numbers and explanations all seemed essential to me in the initial drafts, and throughout subsequent re-writes; yet when the last drafts were critiqued by advisors and nationally-known science writers, I was invariably told to simplify, simplify, simplify.

It was not a ‘dumbing-down' that was required, but rather a conveyance of the essence without putting the message into technical terms. This is absolutely correct when you think about it. While writing about paralytic shellfish poisoning in my articles, I did not consider that my audience had no need to know how many micrograms of toxin rendered shellfish deadly to humans. The measure of toxin was a useless piece of information to most non-scientists. If, on the other hand, I said that the shellfish had twice as much toxin as would kill a person, that brought the message straight home.

Contradictory as it may sound, my science background actually got in the way when I tried to perfect articles for mass audiences. I had become so used to thinking in micrograms per tissue-weight, in cells lysing and in the basic functions of ecosystem organisms that I took for granted people knew what I was talking about. It is difficult to stop thinking that way, to realize that even the method a clam uses to feed itself must be explained in simpler terms than ‘filter feeding'. I thought I knew how to spell ‘simplicity' backwards and forwards, but I found that I had not quite hit the mark and had to try a little harder to make things understandable.

One of the things that I took pride in as a science reporter for the California State University (CSU), Monterey Bay student newspaper was the ripple effect I was sometimes lucky enough to detect from one of the stories that I had written. It was wonderful to find that one of my articles had inspired someone to action. Pride is a tricky thing, though; biblically speaking, "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a downfall." Science writers, take heed!

One ripple-effect story, in which I wrote about the discovery of an unusual geologic feature near campus, taught me an important lesson. It began during a back-country outing, when two CSU Monterey Bay professors saw something in a sandy, road-cut bank that did not quite fit in with the rest of the geologic surroundings. A swath of discolored sandstone stood out from the rest of the bank, absolutely upright and so uncharacteristic of the area's formations that the group of scientists simply stood there and puzzled over it.

The professors both suspected the same thing and offered a fascinating hypothesis. They felt that the column might be a sort of imprint from an ancient tree, a ‘ghost' left over from the time when streams and cool, wet forests covered the now scrubby landscape. They explained that while most trees killed by natural phenomena are decomposed by bacteria and fungi or petrified into stone, this geological feature might be something different: a "sand-cast" of a tree, preserved in the soil through slow biochemical decomposition.

I ran with the idea in an article for the university paper. I not only ran with it, I trumpeted it as "evidence of a million-year-old stand of trees" dating back to the last big recession in sea level. I explained how great quantities of beach sand from the receding oceans had probably been blown inland by shifting global winds, eventually smothering the trees. As the trees gradually died, sand entered the slowly rotting trunks, chemically reacting with the organic matter and producing the ‘sand-casts' that the professors had discovered.

In retrospect, I remember feeling a twinge of discomfort with the tenor of the article, but I was so in love with the theory, with the find, that I ran roughshod over that little inner voice that quacked dismay over presenting a new discovery and a theory as a fait accompli. The voice receded even further when a fellow student, Adrian Rocha, was encouraged by my article to investigate the discolored sandstone features for his senior thesis. This, I thought, is at least part of what science communication is all about - spreading fascinating new insights to fuel further studies, thus playing an important part in deciphering how the world works.

I was partly correct. That is to say, my article did pique Adrian's interest in exploring those sandstone features. When I caught up with Adrian again at his thesis presentation, however, I was in for a surprise.

Methodically, Adrian had set up an argument for sand-casted trees: in theory, sea level dropped, the beaches widened, and wind-blown sands smothered the trees. Then he set up logical questions that we could ask about these features, given their hypothetical origins as trees: were there morphological similarities between the sand-casts and trees? Was there evidence of rooting, branching? Were the grains of sand in the sand-casts the same size as grains in the surrounding earth? Was there any evidence of organic matter in the casts, which one might expect given the slow biochemistry of the situation?

None of the standards Adrian set for the discolored sandstone features seemed to quite fit with the ancient tree theory, though his advisors were certain it was right. As he was about to rework his data for the umpteenth time, a different professor suggested another theory that coincided a lot better with Adrian's data: fluid injection. Instead of trees, these features might be evidence of ‘sand volcanoes', cylindrical geysers of earth from deeper geologic layers, forced to the surface through seismic activity. Indeed, when the evidence was tallied up, almost none of the indications pointed towards ancient trees, while nearly all indications pointed toward sand volcanoes. Adrian's case was compelling; the columnar features were probably not what everyone originally thought they were.

To say the least, I was embarrassed. I had trumpeted the discovery of an ancient forest - evidence of great climate change and of the fragility of our environment - only to have the theory pulled out from under me. It was a humbling experience.

Some time afterwards, I read a piece by David Perlman, science editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, that drove the point home. Perlman talked about Gobind Behari Lal Ph.D., a Pulitzer prize-winning scholar and writer hired by William Randolph Hearst to produce medical and science stories in the 1930's. Lal attended two meetings on the fate of the solar system, each within weeks of the other. The story he wrote about the first meeting quoted major figures in astronomy, predicting that the sun would ultimately expand, torching the Earth and all the planets. A few weeks later, he wrote another story about the subsequent astronomical meeting, where equally well-respected scientists told him that the sun would ultimately shrivel, freezing the Earth and all the planets. He wrote separate, lengthy articles about both, giving full-rein to what Perlman calls "journalistic hi-jinks" - playing one group of scientists' findings off the others'.

Perlman went on to fashion a moral for Lal's tale - essentially the same one I learned through my experience with Adrian - that "...in every science story, no matter how overwhelming the evidence seems to be, it is well to remember that more or better data and more or better-conceived experiments will ultimately force new and often entirely different hypotheses - and they, in turn, will again be "falsified" by new and still more convincing evidence." ³

The embarrassing part is... I knew this! The fact that theories come and go is part of the underlying modus operandi of science, but I ignored it in my excitement over writing a story about "ancient forests." Why I made that mistake, I can't say (inexperience? zeal?); but I doubt that I will make that mistake again. There is nothing like a pinch of humiliation to inoculate against an overabundance of pride. For me, that article will always serve as a reminder of at least two important things: one, that communicating science to mass audiences forwards scientific inquiry as well as public understanding of science (even without the technical language); and two, while crafting an interesting story, one should not overstep the boundaries of the science being performed and of the scientific method itself. It is a good way of getting your toes pinched.