I knew I’d write about fish medicine the moment I heard the sentence “Patient’s up, swimming around,” because it was a clear example of something I call a “what moment.” I can trace every story I’ve written back to one (often several) of these: a moment that grabs my attention and makes me stop and say, Wait—what?
Such as, What? Did you just say your sergeant ordered you to volunteer for a research study on the effects of an experimental drug but didn’t tell you what the study was for or what the risks might be? (Indeed he did, and this wasn’t uncommon or illegal.) Or What? Did you just say you can identify a person’s race using a DNA sample? (Yep, and he’d built a business around doing so, even though the science didn’t support his claims.)
My book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, started with one moment in a biology class when I was 16: What do you mean these cancer cells have been alive and growing in labs around the world since the 1950s even though the woman they came from died? And what do you mean her cells are one of the most important tools in medicine but no one knows anything about her except that she was black?
I visit a lot of science-writing classes to talk with students, and I often tell them that one of the most important skills they can develop as young reporters is learning to recognize “what moments.” They happen so often in life, and they’re so easy to miss—you’re busy thinking about a deadline or a class or when you have to pick your kid up from school—and it takes time to stop and say, Wait—what?, and then even more time to be truly present for the answer. But this is essential to science writing: following your curiosity, letting it guide you not just to stories but also through them, to wherever they need to go.
When I started researching Henrietta Lacks, I thought I was writing a book about a woman and her amazing cells, but that changed when I talked to her daughter, Deborah. She told me she’d love it if someone wrote a book about her mother, so the world would know who she was and what her cells did for science. Then she paused, and her voice grew suddenly terrified. “But how do I know you’re really a journalist?” she snapped. “How do I know you’re not coming to steal my cells?”
“What?” I said. “Why would you think I’d be coming to steal your cells?” And with that, the questions driving my book grew from “Who was Henrietta Lacks and what did her cells do for science?” to include “And why would her daughter think I was pretending to be a writer in order to steal her cells?” It turned out that cells from Henrietta’s children had been used in research without their knowledge, just as Henrietta’s cells had been; that people had posed as journalists and lawyers to get all sorts of things from them—information, cells—and it had never worked out well for the Lacks family. That second “what moment” changed the story completely. In the end, it’s not just the story of Henrietta and her cells, it’s also (and perhaps most importantly) the story of the enduring impact those cells have had on her family.
“What moments” are all about wonder and what we can learn from it, and the stories in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing are filled with them. In “The Big Kill,” Elizabeth Kolbert talks to conservationists trying to stop the destruction of their native plant and bird life through the wholesale slaughter of invasive species. “Let’s get rid of the lot,” one character says. “Let’s get rid of all the predators—all the damned mustelids, all the rats, all the possums.” Wait . . . What? Mass killing as conservation? The result is an important story about the vast damage we humans cause to animals and the environment when we introduce invasive species and the extreme choices scientists face as they try to fix the problems we’ve caused.
In 1848, Phineas Gage survived an explosion on a railroad construction site that sent a metal spike though his skull. As the story goes, his personality changed completely after the accident; he lost his inhibitions and became aggressive, even lewd. By studying how the damage to Gage’s frontal lobe changed his personality, scientists were finally able to learn what that part of the brain really does. Because of this, he’s been trotted out as one of the most famous patients in neuroscience for over a century. When I first heard his story decades ago, I said the same thing most people say: Wait—what? He survived a giant metal spike through the skull? And a big hole in his brain? Thankfully, Sam Kean followed these questions. It’s an amazing story, one that it turns out may be based in quite a bit of fiction.
In her essay “Curious,” Kim Todd examines what she calls “the nature of the itch we call ‘curiosity.’” This is the very core of the “what moment,” those sudden glimpses of the unexpected that grab the imaginations of both writers and scientists, demanding investigation. “Curiosity can be as obsessive as hunger or lechery, swamping the senses,” she writes. “Its subjects seem so frivolous: a baby giraffe, a dodo skeleton, the Surinam toad.” But of course they’re not frivolous, because through them we learn about ourselves and our world. “Intellectual curiosity sparks science, art, all kinds of innovation,” she writes. “Here, in most of 21st-century North America, it is held in the highest esteem. For much of history, though, coveting the secrets of the world and mulling over mushrooms and vipers threatened to drag one from thoughts of God.” As a preacher in the early 1600s warned, “Curiosity is the spiritual adultery of the soul. Curiosity is spiritual drunkenness.” To which I say, Sign me up.
For Todd, that moment of curiosity’s spark is the strange appearance of a Surinam toad. In Sheila Webster Boneham’s “A Question of Corvids,” it’s a crow outside a hotel that seems to say “yeeees” when she asks if it’s hungry. That moment leads her on a deeply researched journey through folklore and ornithology, from the U.S. to Ireland to the eastern Sierras, all culminating in a concise, touching natural history of the corvid family of birds. The spark for Rebecca Boyle’s “The Health Effects of a World Without Darkness” was the moment she realized that she can’t see the stars from where she lives because she’s surrounded by too much artificial light. “After journeying millions of years, their light is swallowed by city glare and my porch lantern,” she writes. “Those that make it through will still fail: not even bright Betelgeuse can outshine my iPhone. Yet I am an astronomy writer, a person who thinks about stars and planets all the time. What does my neglect of the night sky say about the rest of humanity?”
In “The Aftershocks,” David Wolman follows the story of seven Italian scientists charged with involuntary manslaughter for failing to warn the public about an earthquake that killed 297 and injured thousands. “The claim,” writes Wolman: “They had knowingly neglected their responsibility to inform the population about the risk at hand.” The verdict: “For delivering ‘inexact, incomplete, and contradictory information,’ the scientists and engineers were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. They each received a six-year prison sentence, pending appeal.” What?! Scientists sentenced for not conveying earthquake risk? For conveying “inexact, incomplete, and contradictory” information? Good science is often all about the seemingly inexact process of putting forth theories, testing them, coming up with incomplete or contradictory data, revising your theories, then doing it all again as you whittle your ideas, hoping someday they’ll become proven theories. And if scientists are being prosecuted over “inexact, incomplete, and contradictory” information, then watch out, science writers: Red wine is good for you! It’s bad for you! Meat will kill you! Meat will make you live longer!
At its core, like several other stories in this collection, “The Aftershocks” is about the importance of clear and accurate science communication, the many points at which that communication can fail as it travels from scientists through the media to the public, and what’s at stake when it goes wrong. It’s also a sobering reminder of how little most people understand about the scientific process and the concepts of risk and probability.
This is a book filled with questions. What happens when your child is diagnosed with disease no one has ever heard of? Or when you try to unlock—and perhaps even change—traumatic memories? Of co
urse good science and nature writing doesn’t just ask What? It also asks things like Why? and How? and At what cost? In his story “Waiting for Light,” Jake Abrahamson didn’t just write about the fact that some villages in India still live without light, he also asked what impact that has on them, the ways in which they might get light, and what that might cost, financially, culturally, and environmentally. His story and Rebecca Boyle’s together illustrate another important job of science writing: highlighting areas of science, technology, and nature that many take for granted while others have no access to it, and asking important questions about the dangers of either extreme: What does it mean, for humans and their environment, to live without access to light? Or to live with relentless inescapable light?
In “Desegregating Wilderness,” Jourdan Imani Keith makes the essential connection between the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness Act—two landmark laws that celebrated their 50th anniversaries in 2014—to explore the important questions of why access to nature is so often segregated along lines of color and class, what problems that causes, and how we can fix it. We have, she says, “a segregated wilderness, one in which the wild is hardest to reach for the people who, for historical reasons, still have fewer of the financial assets required to get there.” And in “At Risk,” Keith takes a group of urban teens to build trails in the wild, weaving a beautiful essay about “at-risk” youth who are as deserving of protection and access to wilderness as the at-risk salmon in the rivers she helps them explore.
People often think of science and writing as vastly different endeavors, but they’re very much the same. They’re both driven by curiosity, by noticing small moments—a single unexpected piece of data in an experiment, a sentence someone says in passing, a tiny crack in a rock face—and taking the time to see where those moments might lead, what larger stories they might uncover that can teach us about everything from the tiniest organism to the entire solar system. This is one thing all stories in this collection have in common: they’re written by and about people who take the time, and often a substantial amount of risk, to follow curiosity wherever it might lead, so we can all learn from it.
Sometimes those risks mean months or years devoted to research without knowing where it might go or whether it will someday get published, relying only on personal credit cards and a belief that the story or data you’re following is important. Sometimes it means tackling controversial topics for which there are no easy answers, like finding a balance point between free enterprise, environmental safety, and public health.
Sometimes the risks are emotional. In “No Risky Chances,” Atul Gawande, a physician, asks one of the hardest questions of all: What does it mean to have a good death, and how can he help patients accomplish such a thing? He realized that rather than rattling off treatment options and outcome probabilities to a patient facing terminal ovarian cancer, as he’d been trained to do, he should ask questions like “What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her?” What was she willing to endure now “for the possibility of more time later”? For Gawande and his patients, these questions aren’t just about good medical care, they’re about the importance of story: “Life is meaningful because it is a story,” he writes. “No one ever really has control; physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But . . . we have room to act and shape our stories—although as we get older, we do so within narrower and narrower confines.”
And sometimes science and nature writers risk their lives to follow important stories. In “Digging Through the World’s Oldest Graveyard,” Amy Maxmen and the scientists she writes about search for the origins of humanity amid warring tribes in Ethiopia, where paleontologists travel with “two hammers, two shovels, four rifles.”
Sheri Fink, a physician and reporter, immersed herself in a Liberian Ebola clinic, “a place both ordinary and otherworldly,” to show us the “the rhythms of a single day” in an Ebola outbreak. One patient said to her, “They told me I should be very mindful of others. No touching.” But, she writes, “His bed, like the others in the unit, was in an 8-by-10-foot space separated from others by wood-framed walls of tarp, and he shared a latrine with other patients.” He cried and told her, “It’s too pathetic. I think the world needs to come.” And through Fink’s incredible eye for detail, and her willingness to go where few others would, she allowed the world to see precisely what he meant.
I desperately wish that every writer in this collection who took risks to tell important stories survived the year. Matthew Power was a fearless and talented young journalist. He reported on everything from natural disasters to war zones; he followed what Men’s Journal called “one man’s absurd quest to become the first person to walk the entire length of the Amazon River—floods, electric eels, and machete-wielding natives be damned.” He went into Afghanistan to report on the Taliban’s destruction of Buddha statues. As his former Harper’s editor, Roger Hodge, told the New York Times, “He was always searching for the human truth beneath the sorry facts. He wanted to live it—live what these people were living.” And he did just that, much to the world’s benefit.
For his story included in this collection, “Blood in the Sand,” this meant traveling to Costa Rica, into the center of a heartbreaking and deadly battle between turtle conservationists and poachers. Two months after this story ran in Outside Magazine, Matthew Power collapsed and died from heatstroke while reporting a story about an explorer walking the length of the Nile. News of Power’s death filled my Facebook feed as so many mutual friends mourned his loss. We also mourned the incredible stories we lost with him, those “what moments” he would have noticed, stories that would have grabbed his vast curiosity, stories that perhaps only he would have risked following.
Writers aren’t the only ones taking risks for these stories. I think I hardly breathed while reading Burkhard Bilger’s “In Deep,” which tells the story of a team working to map the deepest caves in the world: “On any given day, the cave might be home to a particle physicist from Berkeley, a molecular biologist from Russia, a spacecraft engineer from Washington, D.C., a rancher from Mexico, a geologist from Sweden, a tree surgeon from Colorado, a mathematician from Slovenia, a theater director from Poland, and a cave guide from Canada who lived in a Jeep and spent two hundred days a year underground,” he wrote. “They were a paradoxical breed: restlessly active yet fond of tight places, highly analytical yet indifferent to risk . . . As far as I could tell, only two things truly connected them: a love of the unknown and a tolerance for pain.” Bilger’s vivid writing transports readers deep underground and brings those risks, and the characters who take them, to life.
Like those cave explorers, Cindy Lee Van Dover, the scientist Brooke Jarvis writes about in “The Deepest Dig,” takes incredible risks for her research. She sinks for more than an hour in a submersible to get to the bottom of the ocean. “The view from its portholes moves through a spectrum of glowing greens and blues, eventually fading to pure black,” Jarvis writes. “The only break from the darkness comes when the sub drops through clusters of bioluminescence that look like stars in the Milky Way. They’re the only way for Van Dover to tell, in the complete darkness and absence of acceleration, that she’s sinking at all.” She lands in “a strange land of underwater volcanoes and mountain ranges, of vast plains and smoking basalt spires,” where she’s found, among other things, “concentrations of metals—gold, copper, nickel, and silver, as well as more esoteric minerals used in electronics—that make the richest mines on dry land look meager.” And as Jarvis writes, “Where there’s metal, there are miners, even at the bottom of the world.” It’s a story of fascinating science and the risks required to uncover it, but it’s also about the risks—and potential benefits—of the brand-new industry of deep-sea mining.
I’ve been a fan of this series since its first edition, which my father bought me as a present in 2000. I was in graduate school, just one year into the decade it would take me to write The I
mmortal Life, and I haven’t missed a single edition since. I keep my Best American Science and Nature Writing collection on a special shelf near my desk, and over the years I’ve turned to it time and time again for inspiration, entertainment, and education—my own, and that of my students. So I was giddy with excitement when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt asked me to be the series editor this year. Giddy, but daunted.
I’m a science person; I think in terms of data collection and sample size. When asked to rule on the best science writing of 2014, I set out to find and read every such story published, gathering as broad a data set as possible before drawing conclusions. And here’s what I found: while reading a year’s worth of writing about science and nature—with stories of drought, widespread disease, environmental destruction, overfishing, poaching—it’s easy to despair about the future of our planet and all species on it. But I did come away feeling hope for the future of one species: the science and nature writer.
Though the health of the world they’re reporting on is in a fragile state, the science and nature writers of 2014 left me feeling hopeful about human ingenuity, the wonder of science, and our ability to harness it to solve big problems (of our own creation and otherwise). The day after finalizing the selection of stories for this collection, I flew from Chicago to San Francisco, and along the way I saw at first hand the incredible drought we’re facing in this country. As I flew over drying-up reservoirs, lakes, and aqueducts, I thought of Rowan Jacobsen’s “Down by the River” and Meera Subramanian’s “The City and the Sea,” both stories of communities finding meaningful recovery from water-related disasters, through individual creativity, cooperation between groups too often at odds, and a spirit of working with the forces of nature rather than against them.
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