How I Made it as a Science Writer

I had been a consumer health journalist for 10 years, but now I was venturing into new territory.

I was planning to begin writing about hard science with all its rules and abstractions.

It was frankly a necessity. Freelancing was tough, so in an effort to keep financially afloat, I had applied to write for a technical journal for oncologists. To my surprise, I got a call from the editor asking me to cover the forbidding-sounding American Society of Hematology meeting, or ASH for short.

When I got to the convention center, I pushed my way through the crowds and headed toward an auditorium where noted Stanford University scientist Margaret Shipp, MD, was to speak. The auditorium was already full when I got there, so I had to take a seat at the back. Dr. Shipp was already speaking, and as I looked at the slides of lymphoma cells above me on a TV monitor, and listened to Dr. Shipp talk about "gene expression profiling" and "ras signaling." I knew I was lost. I didn't understand a thing this scientist was saying, and my self-confidence began to crumble.

"I'll never be able to do this assignment," I said to myself, panicked. If I didn't get the payment for the 12 stories I had been assigned, I couldn't pay my mortgage. I nervously changed the tape in my recorder as Dr. Shipp was speaking, and one of my plastic tape holders fell to the floor with a clatter. A man next to me in a tight grey suit jacket inched away from me on his chair.

The following few days were a blur of seminars, one after the other. At one presentation, a crowd gathered around a poster hanging on a bulletin board in the convention center. A journalist crouched before the poster and feverishly shot photos. The scientists who had done the study outlined in the poster stood in formal black and navy blue suits, surrounded by people asking questions. But I looked at the bulletin board in disgust. I could tell this research paper was about Aranesp, a drug for the anemia that is a side effect of chemotherapy, but I couldn't decipher anything else.