Science and the Art of Storytelling

On Friday, when the class of 2001 celebrated its commencement from the California Institute of Technology, the class of 2002 graduated, without ceremony, from its own small experiment in higher education. This year, for the first time in the school's 110-year history, its faculty demanded that each junior produce a feature-length article on a scientific subject, one worthy of publication in a lay magazine (say Discover or Scientific American) and comprehensible to a lay audience.

The juniors may be excused if they were less than universally delighted to discover, amid the differential equations and thermodynamics of their traditional hard-core curriculum, this starling's egg of a journalism course. They weren't being asked to write informationally, as they already often do in term and technical papers, but stylistically, forensically, rhetorically, accessibly. In the local vernacular, they were being instructed to "dumb down."

Needless to say, this left those several of us hired to edit them with some explaining to do. The requirement wasn't just burdensome; it was heretical. Scientists everywhere tend to regard science journalism as a species of grotesquery akin to a two-headed calf--a Siamese confabulation to which the only humane response is, "How do we separate one from the other without killing both?"

The aversion to popularization is sometimes attributed to a prideful sort of academic omerta , an ivy wall of silence guarding the ceremonies of an insular elect. But it has more respectable roots. For one thing, science is easy to get wrong, even by the best-intentioned layman, and especially by a public as given to instant judgment as it is impervious to scientific literacy. Beyond that, the inner processes of science rest on no principle more fundamental than dispassionate precision, a sere exactitude, an abhorrence of the overstated detail. As not in the realms of art, politics, religion or, heaven knows, journalism, its effectiveness--its very persuasiveness--resides in its renunciation of rhetoric. The I Corinthians definition of Love could fit as well the discipline: Science is not puffed up.

Nor dumbed down. So why the new requirement, and the retaining of such puff adders as myself? The official explanation to the poor juniors was that the ability to write would help them in the getting of grants and in their dealings with industry--the alternative inevitables of their future careers. No one familiar with the grace and poetry of grant applications or annual reports was persuaded by this. The larger reasons, to my mind, lie elsewhere, and may contradict the official explanation.