Blogger and science writer Carl Zimmer is author of “The Loom,” a blog about new scientific research on life that Zimmer finds “particularly thought-provoking, significant, and sometimes just bizarre.” The blog has received awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies of Science, and Scientific American. He is the author of six books about biological science, the next of which is Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life (Pantheon, May 2008). In addition to writing books, Zimmer contributes articles to the New York Times, as well as magazines including National Geographic, Discover, Scientific American, Science, and Popular Science. He previously was a senior editor at Discover, where he remains a contributing editor. A frequent lecturer, Zimmer also teaches science writing workshops at Yale University.
Who’s reading your blog?
I haven’t done any artful demographic study of who’s reading it. I think it’s the same people who’d read what I write in a newspaper or magazine, plus people pointed my way who have seen a link elsewhere on the Web to one of my posts. From what I can tell, there’s a much broader segment of the public reading the blog. For example, if there’s a tattoo aficionado website that puts up a link to my blog [Zimmer has a series of posts about science-inspired tattoos], all of a sudden I’m being flooded by them. Or there are social network sites like Digg.com, and every now and then someone who reads my blog will put it up as a recommendation for others to read and then boom! You get a huge flood coming in. There are cases where what I’m writing about overlaps with what other people are interested in outside science. I wrote a post about a parasitic wasp that acts like a neurosurgeon on a cockroach so it can use it as a host for its babies. That was linked to by a lot of places – a lot of video game discussion groups were looking at it to discuss monsters that would inspire them to create new games.
What are you looking for from scientist sources?
I guess I’m generally driven by the research. If I read an interesting paper or hear an interesting talk, that’s what will motivate me to get in touch. I hope the scientists will be articulate and work with me to make a story that will tell people what they’re doing. Then there are other scientists I go back to for comments on other people’s research or to get a view of what’s going on in the field; they’re people who have a sense of where the field is going and what I, as a science writer, can write about effectively in my articles.
Do you have a background in science? Does that matter?
I was an English major. I took some science classes but I don’t think I recognized how interesting it would be and had no clue how much fun it would be to be a science writer. I’ve done a lot of on-the-job training, reading a lot, asking scientists stupid questions. If it was essential to have a Ph.D. in order to be an effective science writer, I’d be out of a job.
How important is the scientist to your story, generally?
It depends on the story. If I’m writing a straight news article, the scientist is absolutely essential. You have to describe the research as it was done by people, and without those people there’s no story. If I’m writing an essay or blog post, it may not be so important to get the scientists themselves into the story. I may not need to go into their research or their motivations. In those cases, what may matter more are the ideas or the results or the subjects of that research.
How do you handle the balance between scientific accuracy and "dumbing down" information?
What I try to do is figure out what are the key findings in a piece of research, the handful of things I want to make sure people understand and try to hammer on those. That means that I have to set aside some less important aspects of research that a scientist may want to cram in there as well. Usually I have a limited amount of space, just 1,000 or 2,000 words. I don’t think of what I do as dumbing down. Whenever I introduce a technical term or concept, I explain what I mean and build up from there. I find you can get into some pretty complicated material pretty quickly.
What suggestions would you give scientists for how to successfully communicate to journalists and the general public? What should they keep in mind?
They need to keep in mind that other people don’t use their terminology in everyday conversation. Scientists need to realize that they talk very differently about science than other people do, right down to the most basic words they use. If a scientist says something is a “trivial” problem, it has a peculiar meaning to them. Others might think it’s a dismissive term, but what the scientist means is that the problem doesn’t require much brainpower to figure out – it’s straightforward. So when scientists are doing interviews with journalists, they have to think of that audience, strip out all terminology, use vivid language, use metaphors, and be unafraid to talk about things personally. They also need to think ahead about the format the reporter is working with – a television reporter might have one minute to get across the results of your scientific research, so the scientist needs to think, “If I had less than one minute to describe my research, what would I say?” They need to consider how much detail the reporter is going to have to describe this.
Talk about some ways scientists have been useful to you in covering a story.
That’s hard to answer because I find that scientists are so incredibly generous with their time in interviews with me. They help me by letting me come to labs and watch what they do, sometimes for hours or days at a time. They let me call them up to go over things a second or third time if I don’t understand it. They’re very patient in dealing with the fact-checkers.
What would you like to see scientists do differently in interviews with you?
I would like them to relax and to talk about their research in more expressive, even poetic ways. What they’re doing is often so marvelous and inspiring that I’d love to quote them talking passionately about science. If they’re reading off the abstract to their paper in a journal, they’re not helping me convey that passion.
What's different about your medium/outlet/format that scientists should keep in mind?
Every format has certain special rules. If I’m going to be blogging about something, I need to do it really fast. With blogging, you’re kind of a personal wire service. As soon as you write and post, it’s published, and you don’t want to be the 6,000th person to blog on that topic. Blogging is always going to be informal, and some scientists are surprised at that, at the tone or the brevity of the posts. Writing for the New York Times has its own set of requirements. I need to tell a story, I need to know where a piece of research came from in terms of how the scientist went about setting up the experiment, how it was done, and what the scientist makes of it. I have to do that in a short space, but there’s more time. Books are different; I may want to dedicate a whole chapter about one scientist, in which case I may make a real pest of myself. Other scientists’ ideas may not be the focus of a chapter, but be spread throughout the book; in which case I have to make sure I lavish acknowledgments to them at the back of the book. It does surprise some scientists that there’s not necessarily a correlation between the time we spend in researching a book or article and the amount they are mentioned, but there’s no quid pro quo.