Fellowships Aim To Improve Relationship Between Scientists And The General Press

For journalists who are convinced that scientists are by nature tight-lipped, humorless, and obscurely esoteric, the prospect of interviewing an eminent molecular biologist or condensed-matter physicist is about as appealing as a trip to the orthodontist. On the other hand, deadline-driven reporters and editors aren't exactly appreciated in the science community for their patience in hearing out all of the crucial details about a researcher's experiments. Sometimes, it seems to scientists that provocative sound bites are all that interest the newshounds. Enter the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which is hoping to change these negative perceptions with a fellowship program that sends science and engineering graduate students to work as reporters, re- searchers, and production assistants at mass media organizations. The AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program has two primary objectives: to strengthen the relationship between scientists and the media and to sharpen scientists' skills in communicating technical information. Applicants to AAAS' Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program need not have any previous journalism experience. What is required, however, is an ability to write and a commitment to conveying a better understanding of science to the public. Applicants must be enrolled as students to qualify. While priority will be given to graduate students in the natural and social sciences and engineering, outstanding undergraduate and postdoctoral students also will be considered. Generally, the fellowships begin during the second week of June and run 10 weeks. A three-day orientation session is held in Washington, D.C., before fellows travel to their host sites. Fellows spend another three days in Washington for "debriefing" after completing their assignments. AAAS pays all travel expenses as well as a weekly stipend of $350. Fellows are responsible for all other expenses, including housing. The deadline for the 1991 program is February 1. In addition to a completed application form, candidates must submit a current r‚sum‚, brief writing samples, transcripts of graduate and undergraduate work, and three letters of recommendation, two from faculty members and one from a personal reference. Application materials will be evaluated by a six-person selection committee consisting of three working journalists, a former fellow, and two experts in the sciences and engineering. Semifinalists will be interviewed by telephone. Finalists are chosen and notified of their assignments by April 15. While AAAS makes an effort to best match fellows and host sites, candidates must be willing to work anywhere in the United States, says Susan Sauer, manager of the program. Minority students as wel as students from the Midwest are especially encouraged to apply, says Sauer. "We get a lot of Californians and Ivy Leaguers, but not many people from the middle of the country," she says. For more information, write to: Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1333 H St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005. --J.K. Says Susan Sauer, a former biology major and manager of the AAAS fellows program, "This program is a tremendous opportunity to demystify science and scientists." Initially funded with a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, the program dates to 1971. Since then, its base of financial support has expanded to include corporate dollars as well as funding from the National Science Foundation. AAAS fellows work full-time for host media organizations, which usually assign them to science issues exclusively but occasionally put them to work on nonscience story assignments. In exchange for their work, fellows receive a weekly stipend of $350 and the opportunity to experience firsthand the world of science journalism. Competition for the media fellowships is stiff. Usually, about 10 percent of those who apply are accepted, with the total number of fellowships varying from year to year, depending on the success of AAAS' fund-raising efforts. Last summer, 17 of 140 applicants were chosen. Most were like Min-Wei Lee, a second-year medical student at the University of Illinois. "I had never considered going to journalism school, but I always considered myself a writer," says Lee, who spent 10 weeks at the Chicago Tribune. Lee says one factor influencing her decision to apply to the program was her belief that scientists should do more to help the public understand what they do. She is back in medical school now, but she continues to write on a freelance basis. Lee says she learned from her fellowship experience that communicating about science doesn't happen easily. "Taking a complex topic and simplifying it for a general readership means you must have a total grasp on that subject," she says. "Now, I realize that there is a lot behind a 20-inch science story." By way of example, Lee notes that she was never permitted by her editors to use the term "DNA" in her articles. Instead, she was challenged to explain DNA in words that a lay audience could readily understand. DNA thus became a "biochemical subunit." This experience alone has already served her well in her work as a physician-in-training, she says. "When you're trying to explain something to a patient, it is the same as trying to make the public understand," she says. Biological warfare and cryogenics were among the topics physicist Paul Selvin tackled during his stint with the Detroit Free Press. One of the many things he says he learned is how difficult it is to "be accurate about everything, especially under day-to-day deadline pressure." For example, in a story he wrote about a company that freezes the bodies of dead people for presumed future resuscitation, Selvin says he made a number of errors. "It was embarrassing, but I learned a lot," he says. "I also came away with an appreciation for the good science writers that are out there." Selvin, who is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, says he also came to appreciate the tremendous pressure under which reporters work. "In journalism, you may work on a story for a day, then it is over. As a scientist, I've been working for 7 1/2 years on the same problem," he says. Still, he remains disturbed by what he views as the media's tendency to "hype" science by "putting positive implications very high up in a story when whether they will ever come to be is very iffy." Another fellow, Zoe Pettway, a graduate student in developmental biology at the University of California, Irvine, who worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, realized during the course of her fellowship that she didn't want to become a journalist. "At a newspaper you have to run everything by an editor, and you have no control," she says. "In the lab, I'm on my own a lot, and I have a lot more freedom to make decisions." It was the near-daily deadlines that Michael Wysession, a 1988 fellow, found nerve-wracking during his work with Chedd-Angier Productions, a Watertown, Mass., producer of science documentaries for public television. "I needed to do the fellowship because I had considered a career in journalism," says Wysession, a fifth-year graduate student in seismology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "But what I found is that it didn't quite suit me. The deadlines were hard, and there is also a lot of calling up and talking to people. That's too extroverted for me." Wysession says his hands-on experience as a science reporter has proved valuable, however. It came in especially handy in the days following the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, when Northwestern's seis- mology department was flooded with calls from reporters seeking expert information. "Knowing how much work I had to do [as a fellow], I'm willing to spend time and go out on a limb to help journalists," he says. "There's no reason a journalist should understand an earthquake, yet some scientists I work with get impatient with what they think are dumb questions from reporters." While AAAS' Sauer emphasizes that the purpose of the media fellowship program is not to "try and convert good strong scientists from a research path to science journalism," roughly 40 percent of fellows have gone on to pursue careers in science journalism. Among them are social psychologist Erica Goode, a 1980 fellow at the San Francisco Chronicle, who is now a senior editor at U.S. News and World Report in Washington; physicist Michael Guillen (1979), a science reporter for the ABC television program "Good Morning America"; and psychologist Larry Kutner (1976), a reporter for the New York Times. "I've thought about going back and finishing my degree," says Goode, who had only to complete her dissertation to receive her Ph.D. from UC-Santa Cruz when she left academia for the newspaper world. "But when it gets right down to doing it, it's not what I want to do. Partly, I think you get spoiled as a journalist because you can call up anybody--people at the top of their field--and ask them to explain things to you. You can't do that as a graduate student," she says. Meanwhile, another former fellow, Barbara Gastel, who earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University, has managed to successfully integrate both science and journalism into her career. Gastel, who was a fellow at Newsweek in 1978, currently holds a joint appointment in the journalism department and the medical school at Texas A&M University in College Station. Her advice to young people struggling to make a career choice between science and journalism: "Don't feel that it's a once-in-a-lifetime decision. Explore all of your options."

Fellowships Aim To Improve Relationship Between Scientists And The General Press

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