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This year’s May 30 issue of The New Yorker presents a letter from reader Florian Maderspacher, addressing “Same but Different,” an article by physician, scientist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee’s article suggests that recent research into gene regulation could explain some of the differences between his mother and his aunt—identical twins, born in 1942. But according to Maderspacher, a senior editor at Current Biology, “Same but Different” misrepresents the science. In concise but technical prose (“downstream processes” and “transcription factors,” anyone?), Maderspacher criticizes Mukherjee for ignoring foundational work in the field. In an equally jargon-laden response, Mukherjee agrees: Additional context would have helped readers better understand “gene regulation in response to various stimuli.” In fact, writes Mukherjee, the context is available in his new book, The Gene: An Intimate History.
This apparent tête-à-tête between scientists provides little hint that “Same but Different” mortified more than one expert in gene regulation. Evolutionary ecologist Jerry Coyne posted critiques from several scientists on his website Why Evolution Is True. The critiques—including two from Nobel Laureates—characterize the article as “intellectually dishonest,” “sad and embarrassing,” and “so wildly wrong that it defies rational analysis.” For his part, Coyne indicts The New Yorker for failing to properly vet the article. Longtime science writer Tabitha Powledge goes a step further, hurling brickbat at literary science writing more broadly. In her blog post for PLOS, an open-access science journal, she maintains that “Writing for Story distorts and cripples explanatory prose. The fact that narrative science/medical journalism is fashionable—and at some pubs obligatory—doesn’t make it right. Or informative.”
Yikes. What does this mean for writers who wish to engage science on literary terms? Should we give up, on the grounds that we’re destined to mischaracterize the science?
*****
In my mid-thirties, I went back to school with plans to become a physician assistant or occupational therapist. But I realized that instead of practicing medicine or therapy, I wanted to write about the material in my lectures and textbooks. Over the past few years, I’ve published articles about medicine and public health in university magazines, joined the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), and traveled to Amish communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania for the science magazine Mosaic, whose submission guidelines state unapologetically, “The most important thing for Mosaic is the story.” I’ve realized something that will surprise no one: Literary science writing is hard. Sometimes the demands for scientific accuracy and literary style do compete. But all good writing juggles competing, sometimes conflicting demands.
Here are some of the challenges I’ve experienced. I hope others will add to the list. Perhaps we can make peace with our beasts by naming them.
Time
In the winter of 2013, I completed the first draft of an essay exploring connections between the life of scientist Lynn Margulis, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and the unique history of mitochondria—specialized structures within humans and other organisms that possess relatively large and complex cells. That essay will be published this fall, nearly three years later.
The essay originally contained a fact I had encountered in countless publications: The human body contains ten times as many microbial cells as human cells. I included this ratio early in the writing process, a process that went like this: freewrite; outline; polish; hit a wall; give up; and then return, Lazarus-like, to revise, submit, wait for acceptance at a journal, and wait for publication. All the while, the science continued apace. This past January, researchers published a study indicating that the ratio of cells is closer to 1:1. (The authors euphemistically note that a “defecation event may flip the ratio to favor human cells over bacteria.”)
Fortunately, I caught the error, but only because I’d attended a microbiome conference and asked a featured scientist if he would read my essay. As a layperson, I check facts carefully, but once I’ve checked them, my impulse is to move on. While science magazines often employ fact-checkers, literary magazines may not have the staff or the funds, and their dinosaur-like publication timelines can seldom keep pace with science.
Not knowing what I don’t know
Before completing my Emily Dickinson essay, I studied mitochondria in physiology, microbiology, and biochemisty courses. I read three of Margulis’s books, as well as articles written by others about her work. And I watched her vigorously debate evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in online videos. My essay included this passage explaining an evolutionary process called endosymbiosis—a theory Margulis advanced to explain how once free-living bacteria could merge and create a new, more advanced species: “Consider Charles Darwin’s tree of life, different species branching away from a common ancestor. Endosymbiosis asks us to imagine some of the individual branches on the tree of life joining together, forming loops.” An image is available online. Still, the scientist I’d consulted suggested bridges were a more accurate metaphor than loops. And in a paper published in Nature this past January, the tree doesn’t even look like a tree, but rather an exotic bird hurtling into space.
Unlike my ratio error, this one required more than updating facts. The image of a loop served as a transition from the science to the personal, evoking the loops in my daughter’s sneakers (“Love this comparison!” wrote my editor). I had mentioned the tree of life to clarify a complex concept. Instead, I unknowingly stumbled into more complexity.
Information vs. Meaning
In the PLOS blog post I mentioned earlier, Tabitha Powledge characterizes science writing’s biggest challenge: “How damned hard it is to explain a complicated topic without major distortion.” In a time when science has a hand in everything from the food we eat to the screens we watch, we need science writing that can translate, or explain, research to non-specialists. And yet, I believe science-writing-as-literary-art has a broader goal: to explore the meaning behind the science, to engage hearts and minds by challenging our view of ourselves and our world. Literary science writing can underscore the sometimes thorny nature of science itself. Like fiction, memoir, and poetry, literary science writing takes me on a journey that may be musical, philosophical, funny, or deeply idiosyncratic.
Still, we can’t overlook the fact that some literary writing conventions are justifiably off-limits in peer-reviewed science journals and even in popular science magazines. For example, in order to convey meaning, a memoirist might invent dialog, create a composite character, or explore a single, unique point of view. Informational science writing, on the other hand, requires objectivity and allegiance to facts. I recently emailed my NASW-Freelance group, which consists of all manner of science writers, asking for their views on literary science writing. Some acknowledged the potential for a literary approach to mislead readers, but most felt strongly that such writing is fundamental to helping readers understand and care about scientific endeavors. So that if a tree (even one with looped branches) falls in the forest, the world will hear it.
Comments from other contributors to the Poetics of Science online discussion:
Patrick D. Watson: I was struck reading your response by the number of times you characterized something you wrote about science as an “error,” that was “corrected” when you changed the story. “Errors” imply that science is communicating fixed facts about the world. But when you updated your copy, that was evidence that facts change! Science, like literature, isn’t wedded to the idea of a single immutable truth, and that’s a strength. It’s science journalism, like Mukherjee’s article on the epigenetic differences between identical twins, that blur the line between works in progress and things we know.
“I don’t understand why Talpos describes these examples as errors she made.” I said to my co-author Natalie, “She seems like she found the best evidence, and updated it as needed. How else would you go about it? In fact, if there was a large literature saying that there were ten bacteria per human cell, and just one conference paper saying it was 1:1, I think it would have been fine to leave her story the same and use the old estimate. In any case they’re just rough guesses and will change over time.”
“But imagine you’re writing the bacteria story.” said Natalie. “You’d draw on images and structure that require a 10:1 ratio. You’d say something like: “If the thing we call ourselves is only a small fraction human, then are we really understanding ourselves by studying humans? Is the brain the right place to look for human behavior?” Blah blah, sense of wonder, etc.”
Natalie was right. For a microbiologist, whether our cells are 10% human or 50% human is not a compelling distinction. But for a writer, being outnumbered 10 to 1 is a very different story than having a roommate.
Your response made me really ponder why Mukherjee’s epigenetics article made me groan. I don’t think it was his use of literary devices.
Here’s a literary science story that doesn’t bother me at all: George A. Miller begins his 1956 paper on memory capacity with a detective story:
My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable. The persistence with which this number plagues me is far more than a random accident. There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing its appearances. Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution.
He then presents a host of experiments demonstrating that the information capacity of short term memory was, as the title put it: “The Magical Number Seven (Plus or Minus Two).” It makes you miss the days when you could write with actual language a scientific journal.
Neither the freewheeling style or the result survived scrutiny: after fifty years of research Nelson Cowan was comfortable titling his counterproposal “The Magical Number Four (Plus or Minus One): A Reconsideration:”
Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can remember about seven chunks in short-term memory (STM) tasks. However, that number was meant more as a rough estimate and a rhetorical device than as a real capacity limit. Others have since suggested that there is a more precise capacity limit, but that it is only three to five chunks.
He followed it with equally convincing evidence. Now the general consensus is the four memory chunks is more accurate. Like Talpos, Miller and Cowan both used the best available evidence, and Miller supported his point with literary devices.
I suspect for me the different feelings evoked by these is the degree to which literary devices are used to provide a summative conclusion, or to ignore the relative quantities present in the data. In the working memory story about a mysterious integer, it turned out to be four and not seven. That’s a minor story change, like changing one characters favorite food. In the bacteria story, 10% and 50% are different enough that it becomes a different story, but keeps the same theme. It’s a bit like re-writing a scene to change the characters who are involved, but not the role of the scene in building the overall story.
Mukherjee however, wrote a story that argues for a specific interpretation. That seemed tone deaf to scientists who notice many causes for differences between identical twins, and saw Mukherjee demanding attention for his interpretation (epigenetic) at the cost of others’.
I wouldn’t call this a “scientific error” or a “literary” one. Mukherjee’s not wrong that epigenetic factors may have a story to tell. He’s not wrong to use his family as an example. His error is in emphasizing one point of view and silencing all others.
That’s why to me, none of your “errors” seem like mistakes. They seem like listening to different perspectives and trying to understand.
Sara Talpos: Patrick, thank you for your detailed and generous reply to my original post. I’m intrigued that you mentioned science journalism because I’ve recently begun to write for journalistic outlets, and working with fact-checkers has contributed to my thinking of things as “mistakes,” rather than as the result of trying to describe something that is, inevitably, a work in progress.
I used to teach undergraduate creative nonfiction at the University of Michigan, and we’d read essays such as Mimi Schwartz’s “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?” She writes about memoir, “If we stick only to facts, our past is as skeletal as black-and-white line drawings in a coloring book. We must color it in.” That’s fair advice for memoir, but I suspect it would make news editors cringe, even those who publish literary journalism.
I admit, I didn’t read “Same but Different” until after learning about the controversy. Were I to come at it fresh, I suspect I’d take it at face value, not knowing alternative perspectives were missing. Do you think it matters whether a lay reader ends up associating gene regulation with “histones” and “methylation,” rather than “transcription factors”? Are there any practical consequences to this? Perhaps one could argue that the article does a net good by piquing readers’ interest in a technical field? Part of me wonders if Mukherjee was simply trying to avoid overwhelming readers with too many scientific concepts.
Natalie’s roommate comparison is awesome. . . .
Patrick D. Watson: Sara, suppose you went to a small town in Romania on December 1st. You observed some folks in traditional dress doing a traditional folk dance. Then you went home and wrote an article entitled “Whacky Romanian Dance Outfits!!!!” I suspect that article would get attention, but I also expect you’d not be invited back to next year’s Grand Union Celebration in that small town. I expect the townsfolk wouldn’t much enjoy your characterization of them as bumpkins, nor would they find it accurate.
Reporting provides a channel for sources to communicate with audiences. It does not make much difference to the audience or the reporter whether a story uses “transcription factors” or “methylated histones,” but if it makes a difference to the source, who is presumably closest to the story, then it’s important! It’s not just being a stickler, it’s going through a negotiation with the reporter to make sure you can trust that they’ll tell your story, the way you would tell it, and not just use you as a way to get attention. Gaining any sub-culture’s trust is difficult and losing it is easy.
Which is just ordinary journalism. It doesn’t change when it’s scientists being reported on. Nor does science let journalists off the hook for choosing which story to report or electing how to deploy their writing to influence opinion. As long as you keep listening to your sources and telling their stories without pandering to your audience, then it seems like there’s no problem!
L. Shapley Bassen: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book, The Gene: An Intimate History, a birthday gift for my husband, is on his side of the bed night table as we speak, and he does, every day, about what he’s reading. How timely, therefore, for me to read this commentary! I must echo, “Yikes. What does this mean for writers who wish to engage science on literary terms? Should we give up, on the grounds that we’re destined to mischaracterize the science? ” Applause for: ” Literary science writing is hard . . . Here are some of the challenges I’ve experienced. I hope others will add to the list. Perhaps we can make peace with our beasts by naming them.” All of us who try to translate science with words from science’s native language[s] feel the weight of verbiage as a costume we’re dress ideas in. Some of us are more aware than others of how much scientists cringe at this. I remember in 2004 writing in my journal about “qualia,” “a word about consciousness coined by some philosophy/neuroscience folk that sent me to my neuroscientist older brother who said when he hears anyone use the word qualia he walks in the opposite direction because he can learn nothing from them. But most of us can learn a lot from the kind of literary rigor you describe and be inexpressibly grateful for how exhaustively you [science writers] do the work! “Some acknowledged the potential for a literary approach to mislead readers, but most felt strongly that such writing is fundamental to helping readers understand and care about scientific endeavors. So that if a tree (even one with looped branches) falls in the forest, the world will hear it.” THANK YOU!
Sara Talpos: L. Shapley Bassen, I’m curious about what you did when your brother criticized the concept of “qualia.” I imagine that response would have discouraged me from writing about the topic. At the same time, I wonder if literary science writing may be uniquely capable of exploring the enduring appeal of certain scientific concepts, even after they’ve fallen out of favor?
Dawne Shand: Sara, I like your point about exploring scientific concepts that have fallen out of favor. So much discredited science informs our daily discourse and public policy. So the question—Why do people hold on to these concepts, even after they’ve been disproved or proven unsavory?—is great territory for writerly investigation. While I can think of many examples of discredited science, I can’t come up with, off the top of my head, any examples of those thread being followed.
I’m so glad you wrote about the Siddhartha Mukherjee’s controversy, which I hadn’t followed it. Damn! Talk about being called out by your colleagues. It made me think, too, that the stakes for writing nonfiction accounts of science might be different than they are for other genres. I can’t imagine a poem, or a novel, setting off the kind of scientific skewering that happened post—”Same but Different.”
That said, I’ve enjoyed seeing all the poets weigh in on the topic of writing about the complexities and wonders of science. I am curious about the challenges of putting science into the poetic line. Do you use a phrase for the tension or music or creative spark it brings to a line? Do you worry about footnoting every obscure phrase? Do the science-poets share their challenges with multi-cultural writers who reference historical events or terminology unfamiliar to an American audience?
Sara Talpos: Hi Dawne, please don’t feel called out. If anything, I hope my post “calls to” writers who are interested in literary science writing. The discussions of Mukherjee’s article troubled me because they seemed to occur in two separate spaces, one for scientists and one for writers/publishers/lay readers. I like this Kenyon Review discussion because it draws together scientists, poets, fiction writers—and folks who wear multiple hats. In that sense, the discussion feels more well-rounded.
I don’t have a phrase for the tension—or spark—that scientific diction can bring to the poetic line (others, please weigh in here!), but I do enjoy Notes at the end of a good book of poetry. They provide breadcrumbs that allow me to guess about an author’s writing process.
L. Shapley Bassen: “I don’t have a phrase for the tension—or spark—that scientific diction can bring to the poetic line (others, please weigh in here!) . . . ” Must mull that neologism . . . Thanks!
Karen Luper: “Why do people hold onto these concepts, even after they’ve been disproved or proven unsavory?” It’s a key question, and for me, one aspect of an answer lies in Frank Bidart’s poem, “The First Hour of the Night,” in which he examines the relationship of belief, or ownership of ideas, and power itself: “Implicit within each/ vision of cause, a structure of power / an imagination not only of / where power resides, but should, must reside . . . ” (I haven’t reproduced his fantastic punctuation.) This connection of belief to power is pretty hard to let go of, once it’s taken root. And it can be understood to describe religion as well as science.