Carl Zimmer’s advice for aspiring science writers | Sciopic
It’s a daunting time to be a professional science writer. Science, it seems, is working too well. As Carl Zimmer told an auditorium full of science graduate students, “It’s hopeless to cover it all, and it’s only getting worse.”
This point in the history of science represents an embarrassment of riches – exciting discoveries are made every day, but there aren’t enough people to take scientific reports and craft them into stories that non-scientists understand and actually want to read. As Zimmer told those of us gathered in the auditorium of Yale’s Peabody Natural History Museum, “Let’s not restrict the wealth to this room.”
Nearly half of Americans believe that humans were created in their present form by God within the past 10,000 years. The percentage of Americans who hold a hard-line Creationist view of the world has been flat for the past 30 years, despite major the gains science has made in understanding our human origin, including sequencing of the human and chimp genomes. The mounting scientific evidence that humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor ~5-7 million years ago has failed to make those data points budge. Consequently, Americans still debate what place human evolution has in the classroom. Similarly, evidence of a 150-year trend in rising global temperatures hasn’t stopped people from pointing to a cold winter’s day as a refutation of climate change.
The public policy that will determine what we teach our kids and how we deal with climate change will hinge on whether or not voters understand the scientific method, or at least value scientific evidence. Scientists can’t afford to discuss amongst themselves and grumble about how the public doesn’t get it. Fortunately, if the attendance at Carl Zimmer’s writing workshop is any indication, scientists are looking to add their voices to the public discourse. If not to increase science literacy then, heck, to at least share the exciting things happening in their labs with family and friends. Scientists can chip in to cover “all the amazing papers”, lest Ed Yong sends himself to an early grave.
