Monthly Archives: February 2012

The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach Part 2: Writing About Science, When You’re Not A Scientist

Posted on by

Matt Shipman is a public information officer at North Carolina State University, where he writes about everything from forensic entomology to computer malware. He previously worked as a reporter and editor in the Washington, D.C. area for Inside EPA, Water Policy Report and Risk Policy Report, where he covered the nexus of science, politics and policy. He blogs about NC State research at The Abstract, and you can follow him on Twitter where he is @ShipLives. 

Explaining the nuances of scientific research to a lay audience has never been easy. Changes in the news media landscape over the past 20 years have created new challenges. The 24-hour news cycle, for example, offers little opportunity for reflective reporting on complex issues. However, there are still steps that scientists can take to communicate effectively about their work. Matt, in his Soapbox Science series, The Promise & Pitfalls of Public Outreach, has already discussed what Scientists, Science Writers and PIOs Should Expect From Each Other . In his next instalment Matt talks about being a science journalist with no scientific background, offering advice for all parties. Do stay tuned for Matt’s final post published next month. 

Many scientists find it frustrating to work with science writers who have little or no background in their specific fields of expertise. It can be slow going, explaining every little thing – and there is always the fear that the writer will get it completely wrong. But working with a non-expert can have its advantages. Here’s why scientists should give non-experts a chance – and what non-experts should consider when writing about science.

Full disclosure: I am a science writer who is not a scientist. I’ve been interested in science since I was a kid (I wanted to be a marine biologist). But thanks to a seemingly irredeemable conflict with chemistry, I ended up an English major. I went on to work as a reporter covering federal environmental policy issues, and often had to explain the research behind regulatory decisions. Much of this research was done by chemists. To my surprise, I found out that I was really good at describing their research to non-chemists and explaining why it was relevant. Chemistry was my bête noire, so how could this be?

I had two things going for me, which all non-experts have when writing about science. First, I made no assumptions about the work or about what my readers would already know about the subject. Second, I did not use jargon – because I didn’t understand it. I’m often surprised by how much scientists think the general public knows about their fields of study. For example, a researcher I was interviewing recently said “Surely most people know what tissue engineering is?” Actually, I think most people probably have no idea what tissue engineering is. We have to explain it to them.

When writing about research findings, I usually start by asking what question or challenge the researchers were setting out to address. This can take a while. If the relevant scientists phrase things in technical language, I’ll ask them to define the terms. Then I ask them why they found this problem interesting. Sometimes it is pure intellectual curiosity. But usually the research question is one element of a much broader scientific question. Science is an iterative process, and the findings from a single research project may move us incrementally closer to understanding the genetic basis for a disease, how we can boost the efficacy of antibiotics, etc.

If I can get researchers to place their work in context, it becomes much easier to explain the relevance of their work to a lay audience. No, you don’t say, for example, “They have developed a cure for Alzheimer’s.” But it is fair, and important, to tell people if a team’s work is part of the overarching effort to help us understand Alzheimer’s disease.”  Once people understand why something is important, they’re more likely to keep reading as you explain exactly what the researchers did.

Here’s another key point for science writers who aren’t experts in the subject they’re covering: when you’re interviewing the researchers, you can’t be afraid to sound stupid. If you don’t understand something they said, and you think you can “write around it,” you are going to screw up. If a researcher uses a term you don’t understand, ask him or her to explain it. I didn’t know what a TEM was until I asked someone about it when writing a piece on materials science. Why would I? (Incidentally, it’s a transmission electron microscope.) Remember: it’s better to ask now, and possibly feel a bit dim, than make a mistake when you’re writing and definitely look foolish.

Once you’ve explained the work, you get one more chance to place the findings in context. As I said, science is an iterative process. The findings you just wrote about are not the end of the line. The researchers may have answered one question, but it likely raises several more. What are those questions? Where does this work fit into the broader research field it is part of? Placing something in context means not only addressing what led up to a research project, but discussing what may come next. Exploring future research directions helps readers appreciate where findings fit into the continuum of a specific field of research.

Being a non-expert will not make someone a good science writer. But it’s not the kiss of death either. If you pay attention to detail, ask good questions, and aren’t afraid to admit how little you know, you can actually turn your ignorance to your advantage. I’ve found that if  I can get an expert to explain something to the point where I can understand it, then I’ll be able to explain it to anyone else.


Ignorance in Climate Science

Posted on by
Jerome Ravetz wrote Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971, 1996) and (with Silvio Funtowicz) Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy  (1990).  They created the NUSAP notational system and the theory of Post-Normal Science.  He is currently associated with the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University.

Our modern scientific view of knowledge was defined by a throwaway line in Descartes’ Discourse on Method.  Referring to his dissatisfaction with his education at school, he claimed,

“I was convinced I had advanced no further in all my attempts at learning, than the discovery at every turn of my own ignorance”. 

He was careful to say that his school was not to blame, although a little later he did a brilliant assassination job on the whole humanistic curriculum.  Readers now might not notice the irony in Descartes’ complaint.  It was not merely another case of late-adolescent angst.  For in the mention of the discovery of ignorance, his  educated readers would have recognised an echo of Socrates.  This founder of philosophy was remembered as saying that his whole life’s work was the discovery of his ignorance.  By the criteria of Socrates and all who followed, the education of the young Descartes had been a great success:  so early in life he had succeeded in discovering his ignorance!  With both Descartes and his readers knowing this background, they would recognise his complaint as the casual discarding a couple of millennia of moral philosophy.  “Know thyself” was out, “Discover truth” was in.

This point is not of merely scholarly historical interest.  The Scientific Revolution produced a variety of accounts of scientific knowledge, differing in their balance of reason and experience, and also in the strength of their claims to certainty.  But they all agreed in their tacit elimination of ignorance from their pictures of the acquisition of knowledge.  Of course, publicists for science recognise ignorance, but mainly as something out there to be conquered by the advance of science.  When scientists have undergone a lengthy and rigorous training in which they learn that for every real problem there always one (and only one) correct answer, there is little danger of them sharing Descartes’ school-leaver’s predicament.

The relevance of this issue today is, to what extent should we incorporate ignorance, as distinct from tameable uncertainty, into our reasonings about science and science policy?  I would argue that the suppression of ignorance in our debates, perhaps even its repression in our thinking, seriously impedes our management of our scientific affairs.

There is evidence that, particularly in climate science, ignorance is something of a taboo idea, even when it might seem to be most relevant.  I have two illustrative examples from the climate science area.  The first relates to a proposed scale of uncertainty, designed by James Risbey and Milind Kandlikar [1], and adopted by the IPCC [2].  This has the merit of providing a single robust scale of degrees of uncertainty, based on the notations for expressing it in numerical form.  It could be of great use in resolving the confusing variety of schemes that are employed in the various special fields that contribute to climate science.  The scale includes five degrees of increasing uncertainty, concluding with a sixth category for ignorance.  The authors were pleased to see the scale adopted by the IPCC, but then surprised to see that the category for ignorance had been deleted in the IPCC version [3].

Another example provides even stronger evidence of a consistent attitude.  Two authors who are eminent in their own fields, Sir Nicholas Stern and Leonard Smith, recently published a paper on the characterisation of uncertainty in climate science [4].  The paper is truly magisterial, bringing deep analytical clarity to this very confused subject.  But, again surprisingly, a search for ‘ignorance’ in the text produces only three citations, and two of those are incidental (p. 16 twice).  The only substantive reference relates ‘ignorance’, rather ‘recognised ignorance’, back to ‘ambiguity’ or ‘Knightian uncertainty’ (p.4).  It would seem that ignorance, in its own right as a qualitatively deeper sort of uncertainty, is not relevant here.   The absence must be deliberate, for the whole essay can be read as a detailed warning of the many pitfalls of mismanagement of uncertainty, along with the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ in relation to models. Indeed , it can be read as a Socratic exercise in all but name and vocabulary.

Particularly for that reason, I confess that I cannot agree with the absence of ignorance.  Suppose that a senior planner, responsible for the long-range defences of the Thames Estuary, approaches experts for an estimate of the sea-level rise to the end of the century.  It would be technically correct to say, “It will probably be somewhere between one and four metres, but where inbetween is a matter of ambiguity”.  The planner might prefer to be told simply, “`I don’t know,” with a review of the reasons for speculating on the likelihood of one range of values over another.

It is not as if ignorance were totally banned from policy-relevant science.  In medicine, for example, we know that we don’t know the causes of some important diseases, as indeed we are aware of our ignorance of the course of future epidemics.  The sciences do not lose public prestige because of their frankness about their deep limitations in relation to some urgent issues.  Rather, they gain trust because of their honesty with their publics.

We can see the explicit recognition of ignorance as part of the programme of a ‘technology of humility’ proposed by  Sheila Jasanoff of Harvard University [5].  It would fit particularly well with climate science, since this is after all a part of a great humanitarian project rather than a quest for profit, power or privilege.  The message of Socrates, rejected with such ultimately devastating effect by Descartes, could inform such a science and provide it with an enriching humane element.

References

[1] Risbey, J.  & M. Kandlikar, 2007: Expressions of likelihood and confidence in the IPCC uncertainty assessment process. Climatic Change, 85 (1-2), 19-31.

[2] Mastrandrea, M., C. Field, T. Stocker, O. Edenhofer, K. Ebi, D. Frame, H. Held, E. Kriegler, K. Mach, G. Plattner, G. Yohe, and F. Zwiers 2010: Guidance notes for lead authors of the IPCC fifth assessment report on consistent treatment of uncertainties, Available at https://www.ipcc.ch

[3] Risbey, J. and T. O’Kane 2011: Sources of knowledge and ignorance in climate research:  Climatic Change, 108 /4, 755-773,

[4] Leonard Smith and Nicholas Stern 2011, Uncertainty in science and its role in science policy, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369, 1–24.

[5] Sheila Jasanoff 2003, Technologies of Humility:  Citizen Participation in Governing Science, Minerva 41: 223–244.

Does a new treatment for leukemia herald a new era in drug discovery?

Posted on by

Brent R. Stockwell, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and of Chemistry at Columbia University, an Early Career Scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and author of The Quest for the Cure: The Science and Stories Behind the Next Generation of Medicines, which was called “critical reading” by Robert Bazell, chief science correspondent at NBC News and “an absolute page-turner” that manages to “distill a complex, changing field into a beautifully written, well-crafted story” by Siddhartha Mukherjee, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Dr. Stockwell’s research involves the discovery of small molecules that can be used to understand and treat cancer and neurodegeneration. He has received numerous awards, including a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and a Beckman Young Investigator Award. He has published 59 scientific papers, is an inventor on 10 issued US patents, has given 60 invited presentations around the world, and has received 33 research grants for over $10 million. He co-founded the biopharmaceutical companies CombinatoRx (now Zalicus) and Solaris Therapeutics. You can follow him on Twitter at @bstockwell.

A few years back, a 75-year-old woman whom we will call Dorothy went to see her doctor and received a disturbing diagnosis: Dorothy had developed chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a type of cancer of the white blood cells. Hearing the words diagnosis and cancer together in the same sentence in your doctor’s office will likely induce a sense of fear and panic, before any mitigating factors seep into your consciousness. This fear alone may jeopardize your well-being, as has been remarked upon in a recent Soapbox Science blogpost by David Ropeik.

Dorothy was at the beginning of her disease course. Each patient’s cancer can be assigned a specific stage in its evolution from a single ill-behaved cell to a massive metastatic invader1. Dorothy was fortunate, if such a word is appropriate in this context, to have stage 0 CLL, which indicates merely an unusually large number of lymphocytes (white blood cells), but no other, more dangerous, manifestations of disease. Since cancers are better treated at early stages, this appeared to be good news, in a relative sense. Unlike more aggressive and rapidly fatal cancers such as pancreatic cancer, the clinical course of CLL is uncertain. One patient may live with the disease for decades without treatment, whereas others will rapidly develop a more advanced disease and need aggressive drug therapy, which may or may not be effective2. So, although Dorothy faced an uncertain future, all indications were that she should be optimistic.

Two years passed as Dorothy watched her leukemia, and in this time, it evolved to stage 1 CLL, manifesting as enlarged lymph nodes. Nine moths later, Dorothy’s health problems began to mount. She endured deep-vein thrombosis, a clotting of her veins, which caused a blockage in one of her arteries in her lungs. Three months later, in April of 2010, Dorothy came down with a weeklong fever and cough, and developed swelling of her legs and a general weariness, for which she was admitted to Montreal General Hospital3. Within days, Dorothy’s liver failed, and her mental health declined, as she faded from consciousness into a delirious state. Finally, 48 days after she was admitted to the hospital, and three years from her initial diagnosis, Dorothy succumbed to her disease.

With our burgeoning knowledge of cancer genetics and mechanisms, why is there no drug that could have slowed or reversed the course of Dorothy’s leukemia—is there any hope for the CLL patients of the future? An emerging trend in cancer therapeutics is the need for precise matching of drugs to disease subtypes—could one make a drug that is designed to address the unique networks and proteins found in CLL tumor cells? Such a tailor-made drug for CLL would likely have fewer side effects than the systemic, blunt chemotherapy this is commonly used to treat most cancers today. Moreover, such a customized drug would likely be more effective, by disabling the specific molecular defects found in CLL. This customization of drugs to diseases is an emerging challenge in cancer drug discovery, and indeed in all of medicine—how do we turn our increasingly sophisticated understanding of disease mechanisms into better therapies for patients?

Increasingly in this post-genomic era, our molecular understanding of disease leads us to a protein that appears to be an ideal candidate for attack with a drug. However, more often than not, these therapeutically and biologically attractive proteins are considered undruggable, resistant to modulation with small molecule drugs (most drug molecules are considered small compared to proteins, which are quite large on the scale of atoms).

Orally available drugs typically function by penetrating inside cells and tissues and directly attaching themselves to crucial proteins that regulate or cause disease. However, proteins vary tremendously in their susceptibility to drug-based attacks. A few proteins have large cavities or pockets that are perfectly suited to tightly enveloping small molecule drugs, whereas most proteins have relatively smooth and featureless surfaces, akin to the side of a sheer cliff, with no footholds for drug molecules. Indeed, all known drugs affect just 2% of human proteins, and most of the remaining proteins are considered challenging or impossible to target with small molecule drugs. Unfortunately, most disease-regulating and disease-causing proteins lie within this more challenging category of potential drug targets, suggesting it may not be possible to address the diseases controlled by these proteins.

The Bcl-2 family of proteins has been thought to represent such a class of challenging drug targets, because they function by interacting with other proteins, as most challenging proteins do. That is, their molecular function is to engage in a tight-fitting interaction across a large region of their surface with other proteins—a surface area much larger than a traditional drug molecule can cover. A grand challenge for chemists and biochemists is to create methods for disrupting these large protein-protein interactions. If it were possible to disrupt any protein-protein interaction of interest, potently and specifically, a wealth of new medicines would be within reach; these would likely be far more effective than out current drugs, and they could be targeted to each disease subtype to reduce systemic side effects, such as hair loss and nausea, that are so common with older, blunter drugs.

One approach that is emerging as effective for attacking protein-protein interactions with small molecules is fragment-based drug design. In this approach, pioneered by Stephen Fesik4, instead of throwing thousands of randomly chosen drug candidates at a target protein to find one that sticks, researchers break drug candidates down into smaller functional units, and test these fragments, as they are known, for their ability to interact with a specific protein. Fesik and his colleagues used this approach to design a molecule, piece by piece, that can specifically and potently interact with the Bcl-2 family of proteins that prevent apoptosis, a specific form of cell death that many tumor cells become resistant to5.

This approach appears to have born fruit: in December of 2011, it was reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that patients with CLL were particularly susceptible to treatment with the Fesik drug that targets the Bcl-2 family of proteins6. Bcl-2 family proteins play a pivotal and specific role in allowing CLL tumor cells to survive, as though their default state is death. In these specific tumor cells, Bcl-2 proteins serve as a critical switch that turns off their death program; blocking the Bcl-2 proteins with a small molecule drug can re-activate this death program.

 

Figure 1. Structure of the Bcl-2 protein (red, white and blue surface) bound to a portion of the Bax protein (grey balls and sticks). When these proteins are bound together as shown, CLL tumor cells can survive and grow.   

 

This Bcl-2 targeted drug represents new hope for CLL patients, such as Dorothy. However, the implications are even broader: an otherwise challenging set of proteins (Bcl-2 family proteins) has succumbed to a small molecule drug attack. There are more than 20,000 protein-coding human genes, and only 2% of these have been targeted with small molecule drugs. Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of the assault on the remaining proteins, untouched by drugs until now. If fragment-based screening and other emerging methods for tackling these difficult proteins are successful, we may see a renaissance in the coming decade in the fields of drug discovery and medicine.

Figure 2. Model of a small molecule inhibitor (ABT263, from Abbott Laboratories, grey balls and sticks) bound to Bcl-2 (white, red and blue surface), displacing the Bax protein. By disrupting the Bcl2-Bax protein-protein interaction, this small molecule drug candidate can initiate cell death in CLL tumor cells. Images generated by Miki Hayano and Gisun Park.

References

1. NCI. Stages of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. National Cancer Institute;  [cited 1/18/2005]; Available from: https://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/treatment/CLL/Patient/page2.

2. Gribben JG, O’Brien S. Update on therapy of chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Journal of clinical oncology : official journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. 2011;29(5):544-50.

3. Esfahani K, Gold P, Wakil S, Michel RP, Solymoss S. Acute liver failure because of chronic lymphocytic leukemia: case report and review of the literature. Curr Oncol. 2011;18(1):39-42. PMCID: 3031356.

4. Shuker SB, Hajduk PJ, Meadows RP, Fesik SW. Discovering high-affinity ligands for proteins: SAR by NMR. Science. 1996;274(5292):1531-4.

5. Oltersdorf T, Elmore SW, Shoemaker AR, Armstrong RC, Augeri DJ, Belli BA, Bruncko M, Deckwerth TL, Dinges J, Hajduk PJ, Joseph MK, Kitada S, Korsmeyer SJ, Kunzer AR, Letai A, Li C, Mitten MJ, Nettesheim DG, Ng S, Nimmer PM, O’Connor JM, Oleksijew A, Petros AM, Reed JC, Shen W, Tahir SK, Thompson CB, Tomaselli KJ, Wang B, Wendt MD, Zhang H, Fesik SW, Rosenberg SH. An inhibitor of Bcl-2 family proteins induces regression of solid tumours. Nature. 2005;435(7042):677-81.

6. Roberts AW, Seymour JF, Brown JR, Wierda WG, Kipps TJ, Khaw SL, Carney DA, He SZ, Huang DC, Xiong H, Cui Y, Busman TA, McKeegan EM, Krivoshik AP, Enschede SH, Humerickhouse R. Substantial Susceptibility of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia to BCL2 Inhibition: Results of a Phase I Study of Navitoclax in Patients With Relapsed or Refractory Disease. Journal of clinical oncology : official journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. 2011.

Open Season

Posted on by
Misha Angrist is the author of Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics (HarperCollins), now out in paperback. He teaches at Duke University and blogs at blogs.plos.org/genomeboy.

Us…and Them

And after all we’re only ordinary men.

Roger Waters

As a graduate student, I studied the genetics of Hirschsprung disease, a congenital disorder of the nervous system in the gut (and, as I describe in my book, a disease that would affect my own family many years later). Among the things I found to be most gratifying (and yes, occasionally frustrating) in my doctoral studies were the interactions with Hirschsprung patients and families. We students had pledged our fealty to Science writ large, yes, but we weren’t studying roundworms or fruit flies. Our “subjects” (a descriptor of research participants that, in my opinion, is condescending and should be retired ASAP) were thinking feeling human beings. If we found a highly penetrant mutation in their DNA, it had the potential to alter their reproductive decisions and their lives. It meant something to them.

But even if it didn’t, shouldn’t life scientists-in-training, especially those whose model organism is Homo sapiens, have some sort of mandatory exposure to, you know, life? Should there not be some inevitable, meaningful exchange between researcher and researchee?

Increasingly, community members are beginning to assert this right in various ways: Open Science, PatientsLikeMe, the Society for Participatory Medicine and the Sage Bionetworks Commons are just a few manifestations. The recent ScienceOnline meeting, which embodies the same sort of grassroots ethos, is my favorite science gathering for exactly that reason.

But of course participants in these endeavors are self-selected. How do we reify their approaches on a massive scale? Virally spreading the word, certainly. But it will also require bravery and iconoclasm. Recently I read The Cure, Geeta Anand’s heartbreaking 2006 book about John Crowley’s tireless struggle in the early 2000s to get a treatment developed for his kids, two of whom have the devastating lysosomal storage disorder Pompe disease (the book was the basis for the movie Extraordinary Measures). At one point Crowley is trying to impress upon members of the drug development team at Genzyme the urgency of their task. He organizes a “Pompe Summit,” to which the 200 employees working on the disease are invited, as are patients and their families. “How many of you have ever met a patient?” he asks the Genzymers. Only a handful of hands go up. Even the doc leading the company’s Pompe trial had never met a patient.  Imagine an automotive design engineer never having driven a car. Extraordinary measures indeed.

Continue reading →

SciWriteLabs 7.3: Long-form narratives, crappy first drafts, and the importance of wasting time

Posted on by

Seth Mnookin is a Lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was called a “tour de force” by The New York Times and “a book that should be required reading at every medical school in the world…a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing” by The Wall Street Journal.

He is also the author of the 2006 bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox, and 2004′s Hard News: The Scandals atThe New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

Since 2005, he has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and he blogs regularly at The Public Library of Science. For more information, visit his website or follow him on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook.

It’s been two weeks since the previous installment of my three-part conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Amy Harmon; today, finally, I’m posting the concluding chapter in what has been a fascinating discourse (for me, anyway). These discussions have focused loosely on “Navigating Love and Autism,” Harmon’s latest story in an ongoing series she’s working on titled “Autism, Grown Up.”

Today’s entry focuses on the peculiar challenges of writing long-form journalistic narratives.

Note: The first part of Harmon and my Q&A, which looked at neurodiversity and some of the issues that arise when writing about autism, is here; the second part, which examined what it means to be a science writer, is here. These interviews are part of an ongoing project called #SciWriteLabs, which examines topics related to science writing and journalism. Of related interest is a recent roundtable I conducted about autism with a group of self-advocates, parents, and writers; the first part of that discussion is here, and the second part, which ran on The Huffington Post, is here. Finally, an obligatory mention: The Panic Virus, my book about the controversies over autism and vaccines, is out now in paperback.

SM: Over the past several weeks, one theme we’ve kept coming back to is the amount of work that’s required for long-form narrative projects. People who don’t work in the industry might not realize just how laborious it is to produce a 5,000 or 6,000 word story – and in an era of shrinking news budgets, just how at-risk these types of projects are. Can you talk a bit about what happens before your stories end up in print?

AH: There are different types of long-form narratives, so maybe it’s worth explaining first that I tend to do what are sometimes called “story narratives.’’ They have a plot and they are told through scenes and dialogue. They also have an argument, or at least a point, embedded in them, but it is often not explicitly stated, or perhaps only stated briefly in two or three “nut graphs” near the top. Like in a novel or a movie, the payoff comes at the end, so you need to make readers care about what happens to these characters, and if you can’t, you’re kind of screwed, because you then you have nothing.

These are different from explanatory narratives, which weave a story together with direct commentary by the reporter and/or experts the reporter has talked to; or essays, where you strive for a provocative argument; or profiles, where the point is to provide insight into an individual at a particular moment; or investigations. (Nieman Storyboard had a great interview recently with Jack Hart, a former narrative editor at The Oregonian, in which he distinguished between these genres.)

SM: That reminds of a presentation I saw last week by Deborah Blum. She and David Dobbs were speaking about story structure, and Deborah had a series of examples of ways writers can structure a story: By building a pyramid, or an inverse pyramid, or a diamond, or a circle; by weaving a braid, or creating a rainbow, or fashioning a wave. All of those can work – but the key, in every case, is to have the material that makes a reader want to find out more.

AH: Wow, I need a re-do of that presentation. I think that’s true, and the challenge for a story narrative, regardless of the structure, is that you’re relying exclusively on the scenes and characters to build that suspense.Jonah Lehrer’s essay in The New Yorker last week about how to foster group creativity, for instance, made me keep reading because the point he was making was intriguing and the way he argued it was engaging. With my stories, though, if I stepped out of the narrative to directly explain things, it would sound preachy and annoying. So even though I have an implicit argument  –“with the right kind of support, it’s possible for autistic youth to achieve a level of independence that previous generations have not,” say,  — I’m trying to always “show” not tell. I don’t think this type of narrative is any better or worse than the other kinds – I mostly do them because I’m not that good at the otherkinds. But they do require a different kind of reporting.

SM: What goes into the decision to do this specific kind of narrative?

AH: I think a lot ahead of time about whether I have the right character through which to illuminate whatever the broader cultural trend is that I’m trying to get at.  What is the key conflict, how is it most likely to be resolved? How much of it has already happened and how much of it will play out as I watch?

SM: Can you describe what that was like for these stories about autism?

AH: In the first one, “Autistic and Seeking a Place In An Adult World,” I wanted to show what I knew was a growing tension for many families and communities as more young adults like Justin seek jobs and a foothold in their communities. When I started following him, he had 18 months to find a job, and I thought it was a good bet that he would land one. “Navigating Love and Autism,” the story about Jack and Kirsten, took about two months to do, and I was very nervous about finding a good ending. I got lucky when they decided to get a cat.

SM: Jack’s father, John Elder Robison, noted in a comment how much commitment the “Navigating Love” piece took. What, exactly, was involved in that story?

AH: That was so nice of John to say. I did spend a lot of time with them. Between mid-October, when I first spoke to Jack and Kirsten on the phone, and mid-December, when I last saw them, I visited five times for two or three days each time — and when I wasn’t there, I talked to them on the phone pretty much daily. We also emailed and IM’d. (At one point I even invented a character in Eve Online, the Internet game Jack is semi-obsessed with, so that I could talk to him in the game, but it crashed my computer so I had to give up on that.)

There was one Saturday near the end of my reporting that I spent in Philadelphia, where John and Jack and Kirsten were giving a day-long workshop to a group of autistic teenagers and their parents. They drove down from Amherst the day before in John’s car—about a six-hour drive—and when I called ahead of time to ask if I could ride back with them, John said, “I don’t see why you would want to do that.” But to me, those six hours were a gift: I used every minute of that car ride to construct the detailed chronology I needed before I could start writing.

SM: When you’re interviewing someone, are there times when you know you’ve just found a perfect scene for some part of your story?

AH: One of my two favorite narrative journalism quotes is from Gay Talese: “I waste a lot of time. It’s part of my occupation.’’ He was being facetious, but he was also making the point that if you are trying to capture some truth about people’s lives, you have to be there for long stretches where not a lot happens. I pretty much take notes on everything, just in case, and when something really perfect happens, even if I’m not consciously thinking “I’m going to use this,’’ I know it because my note-taking suddenly becomes frenzied.

It wasn’t until the very end of that day in Philadelphia, for instance, that an anxious mother whose teenager has autism asked Kirsten and Jack if they were going to stay together and get married. That question, and Kirsten’s answer, turned into a crucial scene in the story:

A mother who had slipped into the room put up her hand.

“Where do you guys see your relationship going in the future?” she asked. “No pressure.”

Kirsten looked at Jack. “You go first,” she said.

“I see it going along the way it is for the foreseeable future,” Jack said.

One of the teenagers hummed the Wedding March.

“So I guess you’re saying, there is hope in the future for longer relationships,” the mother pressed.

Kirsten gazed around the room. A few other adults had crowded in.

“Parents always ask, ‘Who would like to marry my kid? They’re so weird,’ ” she said. “But, like, another weird person, that’s who.”

It shows how Kirsten and Jack’s struggles are relevant to other young adults with autism, and also, I thought, how universal those struggles are. It also speaks to why Kirsten and Jack persevere with each other despite their difficulties. So that was one of those times when I’m just typing furiously, as fast as I can, because I’m worried about missing one crucial word and I’m cursing the fact that I don’t have a recorder on, which I never seem to at the most important moments.

SM: I find the writing process to be much more painful and difficult than reporting, which is the part I actually enjoy. Is that also true for you?

AH: I like the very beginning of writing, when you have the illusion that it’s going to go really fast, and it’s been awhile since you last wrote, and you’re kind of remembering that you enjoy playing with words. And I like the very end, when you’re not really writing, you’re polishing, and it feels like it’s getting better with not much effort.  In between, it’s torture. I mentioned my first favorite narrative journalism quote already – my second is from John McPhee. In an interview in The Paris Review, he talks about how he gets in at nine, and basically procrastinates until five – not by surfing the Web, or anything, just sitting there and TRYING to write.  And then at five, he starts to write, and then at seven, he goes home. “So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing?’’ he says. “Because I need those seven hours of gonging around.’’

I think of that pretty much every day at 5:00 p.m. when I am writing, to try to make myself feel better. When I was stuck and totally miserable on the “Navigating Love’’ story, Dean Baquet, the Times’s managing editor, instructed me write what Anne Lamott calls a “shitty first draft.’’ I hated that idea — but he’s the managing editor, and I felt like I better do what he said.

So I wrote this awful first draft — and it was kind of a revelation. Making the shitty first draft better was much more fun than trying to write a perfect first draft. Also, on that story, I started writing it on Dec. 5, the day after they got the cat, and I basically did not look up until it ran on Dec. 27. For me, that was very fast, and I think just working straight through the weekends helped, because it’s always hard for me to start writing again after I stop for a while. But I probably can’t do that too often and maintain cordial relations with my family.

SM: I had a similar experience once, but the editor telling me to stop being so precious was my mother. I was complaining about having writers block, and she made the point that I didn’t actually have writer’s block — I hadn’t forgotten how to write. I was just obsessing about every word I wrote being perfect. Ever since then, I’ve been aware of how much more comfortable I am revising something that’s already on the page than I am starting something new — even if revising really means taking something I was working on and completely rewriting it.

Switching gears: The Times has had a great website for a longtime — but this story really seemed to highlight some of what the paper is trying to do in terms of adding value to stories online. What was involved in putting together the video clips and images that accompanied the piece?

AH: What I loved about the pop-up video clips and images that we used in these stories is that the technology really grew out of the needs of the story. No matter how I tried, I could not convey in mere words how Justin sounded, how he moved, all the subtle—often totally endearing, sometimes off-putting—mannerisms that make people think “he is different.’’  And we didn’t HAVE to rely on my words, because we had this great video footage that had been taken to accompany the story. It was when we were viewing the video for that first story, which was going to run as a mini-documentary alongside the piece, that the idea emerged to make the video and pictures PART of the story, rather than just running in parallel.

To go back to your first question, all of that requires a lot of work by a lot of great and talented people. I’ll just list some so you get the idea: Kassie Bracken shot the video, Patrick Farrell edited the video, Fred Conrad shot the pictures, Josh Williams created the technology behind the “quick links,’’ Anne Leigh did the layout. I’m not even mentioning the editors in video, photo and multimedia. Then there were also MY editors: Barbara Graustark and Glenn Kramon, who spent many hours shaping the stories and making them much better, and Kayne Rogers, the copy editor, who polished them. It really is a big production, and I feel very fortunate to work at a place where I can do this kind of story and also have so many people make it better than I could ever hope to on my own.

SM: I think that about does it — at least until March, when you and Kurt Andersen will be up in Cambridge for the 10th Anniversary Celebration of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. Any last words?

AH: I’m now in the phase of looking for my next stories, and I’m remembering how important it is to find the right way to do it t at the outset.  Chris Jones, who has won a bunch of awards writing this type of story for Esquire, tweeted something the other day that made me feel justified in spending the time up front. “Idea, reporting, writing, editing. Each as important as the other, but harder to rescue the earlier you lose the string.” Scary and true. Wish me luck.

SM: Luck…