Health and Science Explainers
This is a huge category that could include any material written for a general audience. The priority when writing these pieces is to engage. To keep the reader reading to the end. Because it doesn’t matter how skilled the writing or profound the topic, if it is not read.
Humans are wired for stories. A narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, with a meaning that can be taken from it, will “stick” like a list of facts alone never will. I think of myself as a story teller. Even in science writing, the writer must select the details to highlight, and how to string them together. And that determines which articles are read to the end and which are closed mid first-paragraph.
I love science, and I love explaining it. I like to imagine my reader having that “aah” when unfamiliar jargon suddenly makes sense, and imagine that they are experiencing the same “wow” moments that I do. Those “aha” and “wow” moments are the difference between knowing the facts and understanding the science. And it’s infinitely cooler when you understand it.
Writing Samples
The following writing samples are a few short excerpts of my writing. If you click on the “Read More” link at the end, it will take you to a page with a longer excerpt. The original pieces are not here in full.
For samples of technical science writing or topics on Heat:
Meet Your Heat Shock Proteins
Like many milestone discoveries, heat shock proteins (HSPs) were discovered by accident. In 1962, the Italian scientist Ferruccio Ritossa was studying fruit fly genetics, when one morning he found his incubator to be set at a temperature higher than normal. Ritossa amusingly denied responsibility for the mistake, even in his write-up of his finding. He says "I do not remember whether it was John Pulitzer or Inge or Clara Ghini and Giordano who shifted the temperature of my incubator, but one day I noticed a different puffing pattern!"[1] A “puffing pattern” is seen under a microscope when a gene is being transcribed. Those genes were transcribing heat shock proteins, although it would be years before we would know that, and decades before we would know the real significance of that discovery. In fact, we are still discovering the full significance of his discovery.
Proteins 101
Before we dive in, let’s make sure we are on the same page, with a brief recap on proteins. What exactly are proteins? Like, a side of chicken? Smaller. We are diving into the cells of that chicken—the microscopic cells that make up every tissue and organ in your body.
Our cells are crowded places. They are not the clean, spacious line drawing from your high school biology textbook, with a nucleus and mitochondrion separated by a white page, substrates moseying over in a leisurely backstroke. Each of our cells can contain billions of proteins, doing thousands of different jobs. That line drawing was a bit simplified, of course. Our cells are astoundingly busy and complex micro-verses.