Gareth Cook – Writing Science

Gareth introduces his talk with a scene in Kiev, where he had traveled with a Russian “photographer/body guard” to try to interview the head of a clinic. As they approach the clinic, the doors swing open as if someone were waiting for him. He hesitates briefly, remembering that he promised his wife he would not get killed in this process. The story he was pursuing earned him the Pulitzer Prize.

Reporting is the engine of powerful journalism. Its going places, meeting people and finding out what people don't want you to know.

How I got into Science Writing...more or less by accident.

Gareth was a math geek as a kid. In college during the Reagan era, got two degrees, in physics and international relations. Went to DC to join the foreign service, but decided he didn't like the lifestyle requirements. Did some freelancing and got work as a fact-checker, but started acquiring the skills to actually write stories. Finally he realized that he wanted to write about what he was most interested in, which was science. He became a science editor without ever having written a science article.

The story of Kiev starts with the stem cell debate. These stem cells are an amazing tool for research, but they also stimulate concern from people who focus on the potential for these cells to “become” a human. In 2001, President Bush tried to reach a compromise by funding research only on existing cell lines. As it turned out, the “compromise” was actually extremely limiting and scientists found it frustrating. At the same time, both sides of the argument generated a lot of emotion and extreme rhetoric and fear. As the debate continued, both sides took more and more extreme positions, with scientists promising unrealistic claims about the treatment options, and the other side fixating on the moral issues.

The story moves to the Rossetti family, and a little boy who seemed okay but started showing strange problems. The family heard the diagnosis of muscular dystrophy in extreme terms describing his eventual decline, with words “no hope, no treatment”. The family was extremely frustrated by their helplessness. So they started looking on the Internet and found EmCell, a site in the Ukraine. The site presents a strongly scientific front which naturally gave the Rossettis a great deal of hope. When Gareth learned about this, he took a four part approach:

1. learn about the science of MD

2. the family's story

3. what is the clinic doing, how can I know?

4. Find other patients?

He contacted the clinic, but they were “uncooperative”. He started emailing faxing and calling everyday until they finally responded. He told them he was with a family who had been there and were happy and that he wanted to learn more.

Gareth then shows a picture of a Russian investigative reporter who had disaapeared and was later found dead and decapitated. He chose to go for the interview anyway, but he chose not to take any of his existing notes to avoid signalling to the “wrong people” what kind of story he was writing, and he got in touch with the Russian photographer, who was coincidentally also very big. He was warned that his conversations would be overheard and his room might be searched. He used the spy's trick of putting a bit of paper in the door to detect and intrusion, but fortunately none was detected.

When you go to an interview like this, you want to have a plan for what you want to accomplish, how you want things to go, and some plan B if things seem to be going wrong.

They get a cab and arrived at what' supposed to be the hospital, but it looks more like an abandoned building. The front door was locked, but they found a side entrance, which opens as they approach. It's dark and people are sitting on the floor, then take an elevator to a completely different kind of space, clean, well-lit, and nicely furnished. This is the office of Dr Smikodub, with diplomas and US patents on the wall. Gareth later investigated the patents and found that while they were authentic, but he also found that the Patent Office does not actually determined whether the patented process works, only whether it is an original process or item.

Gareth works hard to get information, or better still a sample, but he gets very little that amounts to hard, source-able, verifiable facts. The interview didn't go as expected, not because it was very tense (as Gareth had expected) but rather because despite the doctor's pleasantness, he really said nothing. The questions (which were gathered from scientists in the US before he left for Russia) were intended to elicit scientific evidence, but the answers were insufficient to decide exactly what was going on. It turns out the doctor didn't have a lab and wasn't following up with his patients, and he would not share any names. Due to concerns for his safety, they leave the hospital quickly, before getting all the answers he hoped to get.

There are layers to this story—the science and the story of the family. In the hospital, he hoped to recreate what Rossettis experienced. In retrospect, he thinks he was overly concerned about potential danger, and that he might have gotten more out of the doctor himself, but at the time, he did not know that. He decided to look for other families who had been patients, using newsgroups related to various incurable diseases. This took enough time that his editor began to get frustrated, and it turns out that the part of the story about other patients ends up a small detail. But he felt compelled by the hardship and suffering of the one family that he knew about, and wanted to have at least one additionally family to help corroborate the story. Eventually, he found twelve families to talk to, but the stories were not as conclusive as he hoped. He focused on whether the clinic had actually followed up with them, and they were not. In light of the claims made by EmCell about their results, that seemed like an important matter. He concluded that the clinic was fraudulent and he then had to decide how to write the story.

The Rossettis agreed to work with him on the story, but they wanted to know whether they should go back for another treatment. He agreed to tell them what he found out and what the other scientists said about it, and in exchange, they needed to realize that their experience would be made public, and it might not be entirely favorable about what happened. The conversation was difficult to say the least. In the end, they decided to go back, and he became concerned about how to tell the story so that readers accepted or at least understand why they made that decisions. He did eventually realize that he was at the very limit of his reportorial limits.

This was not a story that could have been done by a freelancer. It required time and support and resources that would be hard to muster without a committed organization behind him.

Molly asks how you deal with subjects that end up angry about your stories about them. Do you just live with it, or do you put on a veneer of distance that means you don't care right from the start? Gareth says that in general it works best to get the conflicts out there. When you challenge people, you get answers, and you might find that you were wrong. Better to know that ahead of time rather than after it shows up in print.

Adam adds that most people are naïve about being interviewed, but others are not and you may have to cajole or trick a subject into revealing information. However you always do this with a level of integrity that makes sure they will talk to you again next time.

8 Habits of Highly Effective Reporting

Ask people stuff. People usually like to talk about themselves, so they will probably talk to you if you ask.

1. Be there.
   Have conversations in person whenever possible. Contexts make for different kind of conversations. Also you have to go places when doing research. You learn things you couldn't otherwise.

2. An interview is not a conversation.
   The point of an interview is get answers, so you need a strategy for what you want to learn from this person. What needs to be in my notebook when I get back to the office. If you don't get an answer, ask the question differently. Listen for quotable statements.

3. Dare to be stupid.
   You need to ask stupid, basic questions. Leave your ego at home, and be willing to ask basic questions to get useful answers. If you know the answer, so much the better. The answers to obvious questions can reveal additional information you may not expect. You are an employee of your readers. Ask the questions they might ask.

4. Be relentless.
   

5. Sometimes you do a lot of reporting for very little, or even nothing.
   The effort you put in does not qualify you to highlight it even if you got nothing out of it, out of ego.

6. Keep asking: Where am I?
   What is the story now, what's my lede, what' the nutgraph, what's the narrative, what other evidence do I need to support this changing story line. Keep track of what you have to go back to follow through and finish up. You overestimate your ability to keep track of things. Assume you are pretty stupid.

7. Think broadly: or, WNhat would be great to know, and how could you know it?
   Sometimes it's good to think like an editor rather than a writer. Ask what you'd like to know, even if that means you will have to do more work.
   (In this story, he wondered what he would do if he knew what every stem cell lab in the world was doing. He started calling labs and asking basic questions, and then asked “who else is doing this”, which led to more labs, etc. His final assessment of the numbers drew the attention of the NIH, who did not have this info!)

8. Surprise yourself
   While focusing on your planned story, make yourself uncomfortable, seek out somebody who might disagree with the premise.

Now he's going to interview us all. He tells us to ask ourselves:

1. How could you use reporting to improve a piece you are working on now?
2. Who knows a lot about your topic that you have not spoken with?
3. What reporting lessons have you learned in your work? What did I leave out?
4. Who does one source know that might be able to give you more info?

Homework: reverse engineer the reporting in a story you love. Who did the writer talk to? What did they ask?