 My Science Project
From the Newsroom to the Lab: A Rookie’s Tale
My formal education in science includes one “Rocks for Jocks” geology course. I took it to dodge the more serious bullets of chemistry or physics. Most of the science I know I’ve learned one painful interview at a time—with the pain borne largely by the scientists who’ve educated me. Nevertheless, I recently found myself at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I was one of 19 journalists invited to spend a week having hands-on laboratory experiences.
My assigned lab partner, Ken, a free-lancer from Michigan, was a marvel of precision. When the lab protocol said .30 grams, he weighed out .30, not .29, not .31. As we cornered proteins and mass-produced chunks of DNA, Ken poured pensive microjottings across page after page of his lab notebook.
He was Mr. Science. I was Mr. Scared-of-Science.
My 53-year-old hands trembled as I mixed squintingly small amounts of colored liquids alleged by our lab instructors to be significant chemicals. The first day, handling a small square of plastic after bathing it in this, that, and the other chemical for several tension-packed hours, I dropped the danged thing. Despite our differences in dedication and competency, Ken and I were making it. I know how to take my game up a notch—or half a notch, anyway. Meanwhile, Ken, God love him, badmouthed his skilled efforts, trying, I imagine, to dilute my fears. “My experiments never work,” he'd mutter.
Bari Scott (left) and Leo Enright load a gel.
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Well, you shouldn’t say things like that. It might not be scientific to think this, but I know you can talk the universe into stuff. Now it was the last part of the last day when the bad thing happened. Ken and I had been waiting since Monday to sprinkle some chemical or other on a small slip of nitrocellulose paper, and the moment had arrived. Like magic, these tidy blue marks, indicating proteins of a certain molecular weight, appeared on the slip. One of the lab teachers, Bob Palazzo, a University of Kansas scientist, hurried over. “Great job, YOU GOT IT,” he said. We beamed. Now we had to rinse the paper with water. As Ken watched, I nabbed a squirt bottle from a counter. He squirted a bit of liquid into the dish and . . .
“What’s HAPPENING?!” he cried, the sound in his voice that of a mother whose baby just rolled off the dock. The slip was curdling into a papery cottage cheese. We turned the squirt bottle around. Where the word “water” should have appeared was, instead, the vile word “methanol.”
The Science Writing Fellowships program is directed by MBL summer researcher and Northwestern Univ. Professor Dr. Robert D. Goldman and Knight Science Journalism Program Director and former Science Writing Fellow, Boyce Rensberger
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I should have impaled myself on the needle-thin tip of my pipetting instrument, but I sensed the importance of living to tell the tale. After a ghastly pause, Ken recovered nicely. Together, we had discovered the evanescence of accomplishment. In both life and lab, great moments don’t last, and their transience is part of their greatness.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
The larger lesson of my week at Woods Hole was an admiration for the patience, precision, rigor and fortitude of cell biologists. For them, the devil’s in the details: Dropped slides, stray bubbles or subversive solvents can undo hours, days or weeks of work. It makes me glad that I work in a profession, journalism, that has at least some tolerance for bash-and-fit work and that I live in a world where there’s plenty of room for slop.
—Roger Martin
University of Kansas
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The Marine Biological Laboratory's Science Writing Fellowships Program
Science writer and public radio commentator Roger Martin joined eighteen other science reporters, producers, and editors for a week in Woods Hole this summer as members of the annual Science Writing Fellowships Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory. This is the program's fifteenth summer. During their residencies at the MBL, Science Writing Fellows learn what science is like from the inside out as students and researchers in MBL summer courses, laboratories, and research sites, including one located on the North Slope of Alaska’s Brooks Range.
This Science Writing Fellows for 2000 were: Kevin Begos, Winston-Salem Journal; Seth Borenstein, Knight Ridder Newspapers; Laura Tangley, U.S. News and World Report; Laura Helmuth, Science magazine; Bari Scott, SoundVision Productions; Ken Garber, Freelance; William Hathaway, Hartford Courant; Leo Enright, BBC; Roger Martin, University of Kansas; Gianna Milano, Mondadori Publishing Company; Vivien Marx, Freelance; Dan Fagin, Newsday; Mike Mansur, Kansas City Star; Elia Ben-Ari, BioScience; David Poulson, Booth Newspapers; Sasha Nemecek, Scientific American; Jessica Gorman, Science News; Sonya Senkowsky, Anchorage Daily News; and Cynthia Berger, Finger Lakes Productions.
The 2000 Science Writing Fellowship Program is directed by MBL summer researcher and Northwestern University Professor Robert D. Goldman and Knight Science Journalism Program Director and former Science Writing Fellow, Boyce Rensberger. |
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