I was asked to give the keynote talk at “Science, Journalism, and Democracy: Grappling With A New Reality” at Rockefeller University on September 6, 2017 (video). This is what I said.

We’re here at this meeting to talk about science, journalism, and democracy. So let me begin by telling you about a newspaper article on a scientific experiment, an experiment that would end up having a major influence on government policy on a vital issue.

The vital issue was food. The experiment was carried out on wheat. Some varieties of wheat are known as spring wheat. They’re planted in the spring and grow soon afterwards. Winter wheat, on the other hand, is planted in the fall but does not produce its flowers till the spring. Winter wheat has the advantage of a much bigger yield. But there’s a catch. Continue reading “Let’s Not Lose Our Minds” →

At the end of August, I got a press release saying that a chemist named Steven Benner was going to deliver a lecture in Italy in which he broached the idea that we might descend from Martians.

I met Benner ten years ago. He was sitting in a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working out what it would take to make life from scratch. Helping him in this exercise was Jack Szostak, a Nobel-prize winning Harvard biochemist whom he had known for years. In the midst of their conversation, Dr. Benner abruptly turned to me and asked, “How much do you think it would cost to create a self-replicating organism capable of Darwinian evolution?”

As a journalist, I’m not accustomed to such questions.”Twenty million dollars?” I blurted.

“Ridiculous,” I thought to myself. But Benner just tilted his head, looked away, and nodded in thought.

“That’s what Jack says,”he said.

Benner, a distinguished fellow at the Westheimer Institute at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida, has balanced his career between two ways of doing science. On the one hand, he is a data-driven chemist who publishes papers with heart-stopping titles like, Labeled nucleoside triphosphates with reversibly terminating aminoalkoxyl groups. On the other hand, he is the sort of scientist who enjoys trying to draw up Frankenstein’s budget, or investigating whether life could exist in the liquid methane oceans of Saturn’s moon Titan.

So I knew that he’d have something interesting to say in his talk about Mars.

Not surprisingly, many reports have gone for the Little-Green-Men angle. But when I caught up with Benner, we ended up talking not about alien life, but about the philosophy of science–about how to investigate the origin of life when it happened so long ago and we still have so much left to learn about it. That conversation is the subject of my new “”Matter”” column for the New York Times. Check it out.”

“One of the best things about a blog is that it can function as a public sketch pad, where I can try out ideas that aren’t quite right for a full-blown magazine feature, book, or newspaper article. Sometimes those verbal sketches can mature into something more.

In November, for example, I was inspired by an online reading of Moby Dick to praise Melville as a science writer. Soon afterwards, I was contacted by the Los Angeles Public Library, which was planning a month-long celebration of the book that has just kicked off. They asked if I would write an essay about the science behind the novel, which they could include in the program for the final event on October 5.

It was a great pleasure to dig deeper into Melville’s life and times, and reflect on how his scatter-shot education in pre-Darwinian biology shaped his book.

Here’s how the piece starts:

To have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan!

Ishmael asks himself this question at the beginning of “Cetology,” the thirty-second chapter of Moby Dick. Up till this point, the narrative of Moby Dick, as Ishmael recounts his experiences joining the crew of the Pequod, feels fairly straightforward. Readers who bought the novel when it first came out in 1851 probably found it similar to Melville’s previous novels of the sea, like Mardi and White-Jacket. But then Ishmael abruptly turns into a peculiar sort a naturalist. He dedicates an entire chapter to whale taxonomy in absurdly exhaustive detail. Later in the novel, he writes chapters dedicated to the anatomy of whales, their fossils, and their ecology.

Those chapters put off many readers and critics in Melville’s day. All that science felt like a massive distraction from the central story of Ahab’s mad pursuit of the White Whale. And even today, I’d wager that a lot of readers page quickly through the long passages about whale flukes and whale brains. But the science of Moby Dick is as superfluous to the novel as lungs are to the body. Melville used science to elevate the hunt for a single sperm whale into a metaphysical tragicomedy.

The entire essay is available at the event’s web site. Check it out.