Trading Pipette for Pen, Assay for Essay

In 1993, Jamie Zhang was in a career funk not uncommon among biologists with Ph.D.s. Three years out of graduate school, she was in her second postdoctoral job, studying the molecular biology of cancer at Rutgers University. But she wasn't satisfied in the lab--and hadn't been for a long time. "Everybody's unhappy as a graduate student," she observes. "Then in my first postdoc, I just felt like I was spinning my wheels." She blamed the feeling on her doubts about her project and on the different approaches of her and her boss. It was only in her second postdoc, Zhang recalls, that "it finally dawned on me that I just, plain and simple, didn't like research. Then I started to think, what do I like? And it was writing. I was one of those oddballs that actually didn't mind writing her thesis." After answering several ads for medical writers, Zhang landed a job at Wyeth-Ayerst Research in Radnor, Pa., where she helped write new drug applications (NDAs) for submission to the Food and Drug Administration. Six years and two employers later, she is still enthusiastic about her career switch. Zhang is one of a number of life scientists who have shifted to medical writing as a way of applying their expertise in a nonlaboratory, usually nonacademic setting. They have traded the satisfaction of seeing their bylines in a science journal for the challenge of explaining the brave new world of medicine to a readership far different from fellow specialists: patients, physicians, government regulators, and medical-product peddlers. As medicine expands, so does the field of medical writing. In the past quarter-century, membership in the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) has increased almost fivefold to about 4,300, according to Executive Director Lillian Sablack. (Most medical writers in the United States--and no one has an accurate count of the total--probably don't belong to the association, she adds.) Observers of the field say that despite the higher supply of medical writers, demand is still strong, especially for experienced writers. Medical writing is actually a catchall phrase covering diverse lines of work. Brian Bass, a freelance writer in Robbinsville, N.J., and head of AMWA's Delaware Valley chapter, says four types of writing are involved. Promotional communications include advertising. Scientific writing embraces product monographs, grant applications, and ghostwritten journal articles. Educational writing is targeted toward physicians, patients, and salespeople. Finally, clinical and regulatory writing is an integral part of the drug evaluation and approval process. Sablack estimates that close ot a third of AMWA members work for pharmaceutical companies, while 20 percent are free-lancers. But medical writers often don't fall into neat categories. Thus, an AMWA member listing a primary interest in public relations may work for a hospital instead of an agency. And a drug company employee could be writing journal articles and poster presentations instead of NDAs. Some types of medical writing are usually handled in-house, while other types tend to be assigned to freelancers. Regulatory reports, for example, are generally written by staff members at pharmaceutical companies and at contract research organizations (CROs), which have assumed an increasingly large role in the drug development process. American Medical Writers Association www.amwa.org Council of Biology Editors www.cbe.org/cbe Drug Information Association www.diahome.org National Association of Science Writerswww.nasw.org Society for Technical Communication www.stc-va.org University of the Sciences in Philadelphia www.usip.edu Robert Bonk, Medical Writing in Drug Development: A Practical Guide for Pharmaceutical Research, Binghamton, N.Y., Haworth Press, 1998. The huge compilations of documents that NDAs comprise must be composed in-house because they involve several years of coordinated effort by a team of writers. Junior employees are mentored by senior employees who have learned the FDA rules and the requirements of the International Conference on Harmonization, a worldwide effort to standardize new-drug submissions, says M. Alexandra Rohall, an editor at PAREXEL International Corp., a CRO in Waltham, Mass. Because of the intricacies of this process, only "highly experienced" writers can secure freelance regulatory work, she adds. Freelance medical writers often work as subcontractors. "The best way to describe our company is that we're like architects and general contractors," says John Decker, president of Decker & Associates, a medical communications firm in Allamuchy, N.J. "We design educational programs. Then we work with other people who build the various elements under our direction and to our specifications." His firm may use as many as 20 freelancers at a time. Lynne Lederman, a freelancer in Wellesley, Mass., writes sales-training material for drug companies with a subcontractor who is simultaneously farming out the printing, binding, and editing work. Freelancer Terry Ann Glauser, of Bryn Mawr, Pa., does research for a company-sponsored Web site on gastroenterology, then takes her product to a multimedia firm that puts her work online. There is no standard or surefire route to becoming a medical writer. Indeed, though science education is increasingly required, many entered the field with an English degree and composition skills. Professionals interviewed for this article agreed that the smoothest transition for someone with extensive life-science experience would be into clinical or regulatory writing. An applicant with strong teaching credentials might also want to consider sales training, Decker says. Judy Linn, a medical writer in Wayland, Mass., with 35 years' experience, and a past president of AMWA, has this advice for scientists: "Start from your strong suit and look for a job with a company, agency, or institution that needs someone with your knowledge of a subject." The pharmaceutical companies often court people with Ph.D.s in immunology, pharmacology, or biochemistry. The "tough part," in Linn's opinion, may be finding oneself in an entry-level job after having progressed reasonably far in a science career. Keith I. Jones, director of staffing at Covance Inc., a CRO in Princeton, N.J., says that his firm likes applicants who have already done some sort of medical writing, freelance whether at a CRO or pharmaceutical company, or in an academic or other scientific research-oriented environment. As for advanced degrees, he notes that "if you're going to be an associate director or a director in a medical writing group, usually [they] possess doctorates [in science or pharmacy], along with extensive years of experience." Though Linn acknowledges that more people are being forced to freelance as companies downsize and farm out work, she warns against starting out as a freelancer ("you'll go broke"). For Brian Bass, however, a short-term freelance project provided a springboard into his first medical-writing staff position. Bass offers two other suggestions for breaking into the field: Beginners should look beyond the well-known drug companies into areas such as diagnostics, orthopedics, and animal pharmaceuticals. And neophytes interested in a certain type of writing can create samples on their own--an advertisement, say, or a "white paper" (a reviewlike article commissioned by a company). These samples can be collected into a portfolio and shown to employers. One job-hunting strategy consistently touted by veteran medical writers is to join AMWA and other trade groups and to network at their annual and chapter meetings. Job openings are advertised in AMWA's monthly job market sheet, at the Web sites of some of the trade groups, and in newspapers. In a recent Sunday edition of The New York Times, for instance, nine classified ads under the heading "editorial" were for medical-writing positions. Since on-the-job training for medical writers tends to be informal, some aspirants to the field might consider taking courses that teach the requisite skills. Associations, including AMWA, sponsor short classes. In colleges, medical writing often falls under the rubric of technical writing and may be offered by the English department, explains Robert Bonk, who teaches the subject at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia (USP), Drexel University, and the University of Delaware. In 1997, USP began a master's-level biomedical writing program that it touts as the only one of its kind in the country; last year, it introduced a bachelor's-level program. These programs typically require on-the-job training. Bonk, once a medical writer at the company now known as AstraZeneca PLC, sees them as "a great opportunity for someone who is either trying to get into the writing field and is already working in science, or who has already been thrown into a writing job and wants to get better credentials and skills." An important consideration for the life scientist looking into a medical-writing career is salary. How does it compare to the modest pay in academia? A 1994 survey of AMWA members (to which 47 percent responded) found that $49,967 was the average salary for full-time "biomedical communicators." But that figure masked large differences among job categories. The mean income at advertising agencies and communications companies was $65,755, while pay at universities, medical schools, and hospitals was about $37,000. Salaries in the mid-Atlantic states were most generous. Freelance rates averaged $34 per hour for editing alone up to $76 per hour for research and writing. According to professionals interviewed for this article, clinical and regulatory writing at pharmaceutical companies and CROs now commands annual salaries ranging from $55,000 to $85,000, depending on experience. One final caveat, especially for bench scientists: If you want to be a medical writer, you will simply have to get used to immobility. "When you're in the lab, you're running here and there," observes Zhang, the cancer-researcher-turned-writer. "Almost the hardest adjustment was just sitting still at one spot, being confined to a cubicle and a desk and a computer." Terry Ann Glauser Freelancer, Bryn Mawr, Pa. After 10 years as an emergency-room doctor, Glauser grew tired of the grueling hours and "frustrated watching people have the same kinds of injuries over and over again." So she earned a master's in public health from Johns Hopkins University but found she couldn't move to where the jobs were. Using connections and networking, she has built up a career working for pharmaceutically oriented multimedia firms on educational CD-ROMs and Web sites. She says that her income is 60 to 75 percent of her emergency-room salary and that getting work hasn't been difficult, thanks to her strong medical background. A stint doing clinical writing bored her because "you can't restructure a clinical-trial report." Andrea GwosdowGwosdow Associates Arlington, Mass. After receiving a Ph.D. in physiology, Gwosdow was a research scientist for 12 years at Yale and Harvard. She enjoyed setting up experiments and getting results but "didn't like repeating everything thousands of times" and the radioactive and chemical exposures. Volunteering at Boston Museum of Science and directing an outreach program with a local school, she found she "really liked explaining science to people" and in 1997 started a consulting business. First, she called "everybody I knew, and everybody somebody would give me a name of" and conducted informational interviews. Besides doing medical writing, she works with science educators and with lawyers who need scientific expertise. Jamie Zhang Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Plainsboro, N.J. After writing NDAs at Wyeth-Ayerst Research, Zhang was contacted by a headhunter and got a similar job at Janssen Pharmaceutica. In her third year there, she was running clinical trials more than writing about them--and didn't like it. So a headhunter call later, she moved to Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she puts together protocols for clinical oncology trials. "It's perfect for me because my background in graduate school and my postdocs were in cancer research." Her science training has helped in two other ways: to get her first writing job at Wyeth-Ayerst and when "I have to dive into a whole bunch of journal articles." Lynne Lederman Freelancer, Wellesley, Mass. Her thesis adviser told Lederman that when she ran her own lab someday, she would "hate" spending all her time writing papers and grant applications. But after two discouraging postdocs and a research position in industry, she got an industry job involving lots of writing and enjoyed it. Laid off when the company ran short on money, she began doing freelance medical writing "to give me the freedom to do other things" like artwork. It took nearly three years to earn a satisfactory income, but the work is steady now. She relishes the diversity of her projects. One day, she'll write sales-training material; another day, a chapter on sudden infant death syndrome. Michael Stillman DendWrite Communications Framingham, Mass. After five years of Ph.D. research in neuroscience at the U.S. Army base in Natick, Mass., and a year there as a postdoc, Stillman realized that faculty positions weren't opening up anytime soon. Not eager to do the additional postdocs for an industry job, he applied to a communications firm in New Jersey that had advertised in Science. He was hired out of 200 applicants, he thinks, because of the 20 articles, abstracts, and presentations listed on his résumé. After a year ghostwriting articles and writing newsletters and posters, he returned to the Boston area to start his own business. It handles medical and technical writing, as well as Web site development, which he says can be a promotional device for a medical writer. J. Kling, "Talking science with nonscientists: a personal communication," The Scientist, 13[7]:12, March 29, 1999. R. Lewis, "Broader Ph.D. training can benefit science and society," The Scientist, 13[3]:1, Feb. 1, 1999. K. Hopkin, "Traitors or trailblazers? Scientists pursue 'alternative' careers," The Scientist, 12[22]:1, Nov. 9, 1998. R. Lewis, "Anatomy of a press release," The Scientist, 12[21]:9, Oct. 26, 1998. R. Lewis, "Writing book chapters broadens the scientific experience," The Scientist, 12[13]:12, June 22, 1998. S. Hoffert, "Proposal writing services give researchers a competitive edge," The Scientist, 12[2]:12, Jan. 19, 1998. Douglas Steinberg is a freelance science writer based in New York.

Trading Pipette for Pen, Assay for Essay

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