Continued from this post

At the conference on Saturday, I managed to grab Bora Zivkovic, the co-organizer of the conference, for 20 minutes over lunch to ask him a few questions about his blog, his new book, The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006 and science blogging in general (you can read the full Q&A here)

The next time I meet a scientist who looks down on blogging as a waste of time, I’ll tell that person the story of Bora. He, like many other graduate students out there, was having a tough time in the lab. He was burnt out, going through a difficult time in his personal life, and so he left the lab with three-quarters of his PhD thesis written.

He began his second career as a science blogger. After three years of thinking and writing about his area of research on his blog (commenting on papers, writing tutorials for students, even rewriting his published papers with a fresh eye), he regained his enthusiasm and motivation to do science. Now he’s back at work on his dissertation and is intent on defending in the spring. He has plans to start work as a postdoc in a lab of a fellow blogger, a PI he met through the science blogosphere. So blogging doesn’t distract someone from doing science. It can bring someone back into doing science.

Stay tuned for part 3 about ‘open chemistry’.