Transcript from a portion of the conference, Communicating the Future: Best Practices for Communication of Science and Technology to the Public, March 6-8, 2002.

Live from the Field: Observing Science in Its Natural Habitat
Hannah Holmes, freelance writer; reporter and columnist, Discovery Online; and author, The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things

Well, thanks for having me, it's fun to be here. Thanks for the soapbox. It is my favorite one. I think science writing really labors under a burden: The public thinks they don't like science stories. But I think they just don't get a lot of perks and thrills and frills in the average science story.

And going to the field is a really great way to put in a lot of bells and whistles that will drive a story and keep the momentum going, even if the facts are a bit dull.

And when I say either I mean , if you don't mind dismemberment and dysentery - because there are some hardships that go along with it. So far they seem to balance out.

I want to talk about some elements that go into most science stories, and how going into the field can pump those up and put some life into a science report. How it can turn a report into a story. I think for me the goal is to make a science report into a narrative that has some momentum of its own, and a story line, and characters. So let me just talk about some of the basics that go into a story, and how going out there can help to build those.

One is plot. Science lends itself so well to a mystery story. It always starts with a question. There are always little revelations along the way. At the end there may be an answer, there may not. There may be new questions - it doesn't matter, if you have the momentum of a discovery process.

Let me just give you an example of how that played out with my first assignment, with Discovery actually. The editors there had read a news report about a woman who found phytoliths - there are little tiny rocks that form in the skins of plants - she had taken these out of a mud core from an ancient lake. And by studying which phytoliths were in which layers, she could conclude that people were practicing slash and burn agriculture in Central America 7,000 years ago. Well, that was the news report. Discovery sent me to Panama to turn it into a story. And I collected scenes that I could string together to bring this series of facts to life.

So I met Dolores Piperno. She's not just some lady. She's like a tractor. There's not an ounce of nonsense in this woman. She threw me in her car and drove out into the Panama countryside. And it was beautiful and there were orange flower petals all over the road, and it was just lovely. We got to a big flat valley, a beautiful valley. There were cows out there in the valley. And it tuns out this is actually an old lake bed. This is where she got her mud. There is another scene that I can use.

She took me to her mud room, which is a giant refrigerator full of mud. And she took a core out of there and brought it to her lab bench. I could smell the mud. I could see the texture of the mud. I could bond with the mud. There's another scene. These are some more sensory elements that people can start to hook into to envision this stuff.

And then she brought out pictures of the phytoliths, and they are not just dumb little rocks - they're beautiful little clear silicate things. Every plant makes a very specific shape. So some are golf balls. Some are little lasagna noodles. Some are little cones. They're really neat. Some of them were black. They were black because people had set fire to these plants. And it started to come to life for me.

For the last piece of that story I went to Barro Colorado Island where there is a rainforest reserve. I just wanted to see what it' s like to be in a real rainforest.

So stringing those things together helped to bring a news report more to life. That was the early days of Discovery and they didn't string them together. They wanted the reader to be able to chart her own course. So you could start anywhere and it was very disastrous. (laughter) But it was a start. I did my part.

Another element of a science story is usually a star or a cast of characters - some researcher or a group. And I don't know about you, but my experience with
interviewing scientists in their offices is not always that exciting. (laughter) And it's understandable They tend to be nervous. They are worried that you are just not going to get it. And it's a real risk, I think, a lot of the time. So they're tense. And they're not accustomed to being the center of attention. The dynamic is just not very good.

But if you get that person out into the field, especially if you get them out with their buddies, it is a completely different situation. The group dynamic causes everyone's energy to go up. People interact with each other in real ways that brings out their real personalities. And you see them for the interesting - kooky, odd, weird, whatever - people that they are.

For an example, I'll go to Monserrat from Panama. This situation actually presented both sides of the coin. The Monseratt Volcano Observatory was a very transitory place. Both students and sort of "boss types" would rotate through on pretty short rotations. Two weeks. Maybe two months. So it was never quite clear who was who - who's the boss, who are the small people. There was a lot of tension and a lot of unhappiness. So I would go into the Observatory every day - I was there for a three week project reporting every day to Discovery. I would go in in the morning, and everyone would just be in their corner doing their thing - nobody looking at anybody else, nobody talking, certainly. And no one talked to me. No one wanted to be overheard because there was so much tension.

But at some point in the day, people would get in a vehicle and go do some field work. And I would get in the vehicle with them and shut the door and these personalities would just explode in the car. They would be joking with each other, making fun of each other, trying to make me laugh. They would be spontaneously commenting on how the mountain looks today or how it smells, or what they noticed yesterday. It was a completely different side of them and it was a lot more fun.

So one day we went out to get ash samples. And volcanic ash - again, my first impression is not wild excitement. It's little, its gray, it's supremely annoying to work with. But volcanic ash in the hands of this student, Haley Duffle, was quite another matter. This girl was screaming at cows because they had knocked over her ash trays. (laughter) Her ash trays happen to be bureau drawers that she stole from a dilapidated hotel which got ashed over. And then she is yelling at her advisor because he is not being careful brushing the ash out of the tray into little Ziploc bags. And these will be sent to the UK to be analyzed for their deadly crystobalite content. And suddenly, ash is a lot more interesting.

Another day I got in a truck with some students, with an advisor they really liked And we went to take the temperature of some pryoclastic ash that had settled over some towns. We're sticking a probe 20 cm into some ash and we're waiting the prescribed 84 seconds and we're writing down the number. But these folks get along really well. They're having a good time. They're all asking the advisor questions. And he's just feeding them information, feeding me information, it's very natural. And at some point he started digging up trees out of the ash. This is like a 20-foot deep section of ash. So he was digging out these blackened trees, and I'm thinking he's going to analyze these for how hot it was when the ash hit the trees and he is going to get something really interesting here.

Turns out they were having a barbecue, and this was free-range charcoal. (laughter)

The same group walked up the hill and they found a little hole in the ash. One of the students said they had talked to a friend who is a biologist, and the biologist said that iguanas like to lay their eggs in warm places. And they'll dig down to the right temperature in the ash and put their eggs in there.

And the point is that these aren't one dimensional, shy people with one interest. They are multi-dimensional. They have a lot of interests. They're creative. They're fun. They're people you want to hang around with. And that is the kind of mood that I want to pass on to the reader.

Sometimes you do have office bound researchers that who don't do wonderful things in the field. But some of these techniques can still apply. It is a darn sight better to go see someone in their office than to talk to them on the phone, because any little detail you can pass along helps the readers to build their own image of the person, and to invest in the story.

I'll give you an example from the dust book. I needed a space dust scientist. I had two guys to choose from. One guy was at Cal tech. He was doing interesting research. He was using kiddie pools to catch space dust. He's obviously got some interesting stuff going on. But I talked to him on the phone and he was unbelievably shy. He could hardly talk. He was a yes-or-no kind of guy. Ventured nothing. So I tried the next guy, Don Brownlee at the University of Washington. Shy! But a little more forthcoming. I went to Seattle for other reasons, so I went and talked to him. And the guy's wearing a bright green shirt. And I'm thinking, well that's a little different - that's something that maybe the reader can start to build on. And he's got some cut mannerisms. Yes, he's shy, but also he's quirky and he's funny. He's got a poster on his wall of an astronaut standing on the moon in a space suit taking a pee. (laughter)

So even if they're not doing something wild in the field, there are still details you can pick up about them that help the reader to understand that they really are just "folks."

Now, all of this stuff is really window dressing, and little hooks, and little perks to get people to the lesson. Ultimately I want to sneak some science in here without making it painful. I want it to be so subtle that it is under the radar, and people don't go, "Ewwww, a science story."

And this where going to the field is really invaluable - for a few reasons. One is accuracy. For me to put my eyes on the subject and to watch something unfold is worth so many millions of words. There is just no comparison.

One very simple illustration of this: Before I went on a fossil expedition, if
I had written about a fossil discovery, I would have been at risk of summarizing along these lines. You go to the field. You dig up a fossil. You get something that has all its ribs attached, its legs attached, it's got all its vertebrae in a line and you pull that out of the rocks and you take it home. That would have been my working assumption. Having seen how it really happens, now I know that you really just dig up a piece of rock about this big. Maybe there's a little bit of a head over here. Maybe there's a little bit of a tail over here. And you hope the rest is in there. And some time months or years from now, you'll actually see the rest of the fossil. So without witnessing the process, I would have had no idea.

Another real benefit is access. It's one thing to talk to somebody on the phone and to have them say, "If you've got any more questions, give me a call. Don't hesitate to call." Or, "Come by if you have more questions." Well that's okay. But if you are on expedition with them, you're living with them they can't get away. (laughter). You throw a rock and you hit someone who is really interested.

I was on a Woods Hole expedition with the Alvin submarine - and talk about a contained group. There was nowhere these scientists could go. (laughter) And every afternoon the Alvin would come back up on the deck and all these scientists would gather around. And the geo guys would take their rocks and go to the rock lab. And the gas folks would take their gases and go to the gas lab. And the bio people would take their slimy things and go to the bio lab. And whatever you were interested in, you'd just go along.

All the grad students and all the other scientists would gather, because of lot that stuff is pretty new and pretty exciting. And it was a very spontaneous, natural, energetic exploration of a discovery - in some cases, stuff these people had ever seen before in person. So, we picked up a spaghetti worm one day from the bottom of the ocean. I've certainly never seen one. But I was not the only person asking questions. No one had seen this. So everyone was talking about it. That kind of access is just priceless in terms of bringing the story to life.

For me personally, the ability to draw diagrams and make illustrations is another enormous benefit of being with the people you are working with. I'm just kind of stupid about some subjects. If someone can draw me a picture. . . I was once at the Space Telescope Science Institute and someone was trying to explain red shift to me. A guy finally got so fed up he drew a little diagram on a clear piece of paper - well, a clear piece of something - and he put it on the photocopy machine and blew it up. And everything moved farther away from everything else. And it doesn't translate as I'm telling it to you - which is kind of the point. (laughter) I love that about being with people.

And finally in terms of conveying the lesson, there are slow days, there are boring days in research. Its so nice to have fun things to fall back on to keep the reader there with you, especially if you are doing day-after-day reporting. So it's nice to be able to fall back on the local culture. How it might relate to the subject. There used to be cabins in Mongolia built out of dinosaur bones. I never saw one. But that's the kind of local color that can buttress the science on a slow day: People have always lived among these things and this science is just a new way of looking at them.

Now, I did mention that there were some occupational hazards. One of them is that this business about nature abhorring a vacuum is just not true. The Monserrat Volcano had not been a toy volcano, it had killed a lot of people. Destroyed an island. Destroyed a culture, more or less. My boat pulled up to Monserrat and the thing went dormant. (laughter) I was there for three or four weeks writing every day about the exciting volcano.

A friend and I, a photographer, we did the San Andreas fault, started at the bottom and again it was a daily diary thing for Discovery, for three or four weeks. And there were two earthquakes the entire time, and they were both in towns that we had just left. (laughter)

This is a category of problems that I have learned to deal with. I always chart out as best I can what I'm going to cover on any given day. I make contingencies. And I always leave things with my editor - things that are completely researched, written, and done. So if I am stuck in a truck for four days, he has something to put up.

When we went to Mongolia to do dinosaurs, for instance, I left stuff like, "How does a bone turn into a fossil underground." It had nothing to do with the day-to-day excitement, but it was something on the site, at least.

Another occupational hazard, a little more problematic, is the professional category. When you're living with people you see how cute and funny and smart and fun they are - and you also see that some of them are real jerks. (laughter)

And again, sometimes you're really stuck there. I'm been stuck with a fruit bat who thought I was broadcasting details of her intimate life on the internet. And she was furious with me the entire time and there was nothing I could do about it. She just wasn't very healthy.

I've been stuck with a stalker. In this case the guy had control over whether I saw a very special thing . . . not that thing! He was in charge of access to a scientific thing. He could say if I got to go on that expedition or not. And he kept me in suspense until the very end. Had it ever turned into a sort of physically threatening situation - as opposed to just extremely annoying - I'm sure I would have done something about it. But I chose to have that access. Anyone else might do something different. It's just good to know that that kind of situation can occur.

Ego issues can be a nightmare. I think often scientists punish their peers if they appear to be too much fun, too casual, too un-serious. Scientists who talk to the press a great deal are sometimes at risk of being slapped by their peers. And that makes them very sensitive about what you write about them and how you portray them. And that can be a battle.

The worst of this category for me - I'll take anything else other than the desperately shy or disinterested subject. There is just nothing to do about them. If they don't want to talk to you, they don't want to talk to you. And there you are for three or four weeks.

As unpleasant as the professional hazards are they don't hold a candle to the technology hazards.

This is particularly for the live internet stuff that Discovery does. I'll just give you a run-down of our Gobi desert experience. This was the American Museum of Natural History with their annual dinosaur and mammal expedition to the Gobi desert.

The photographer and I, we each had a computer. We had a back-up computer. We had a satellite phone. We had a back-up satellite phone. We had two sets of solar panels. And just because of a quirk of Discovery's calendar, we had to start our project a few days before we were actually in fossil country, so we started reporting from Ulan Batar, just with color - local color.

So we plugged in satellite phone number one and - snap, crackle, pop - we're down a satellite phone already and we haven't left Ulan Batar. So we hooked up the solar panels, and held them out the windows to charge up the equipment.

Once we got down into the desert, we hooked the solar panels to the computers. And that seemed all right. You'd wrap up the computer in a lot of plastic - it is so dusty. And then attach it with little umbilical out through a Ziploc bags to the solar panel and you'd go off fossilizing with the group for the day. But you'd look back to camp from a half a mile away in the middle of the day and you would see these blue birds. And these solar panels would get picked up by the wind and they would just go. And the little laptop would be going along behind it. (laughter) So we put rocks on them. We sorted that out.

And then we got an email over the satellite phone from our editor saying, "Discontinue all use of the solar panels." Another guy was on assignment in Brazil using the same configuration and the solar panels had fried his computer dead as a door nail. So now, "Do not use the solar panels." We're out of outlets now. And we have no solar panels. We're left with cigarette lighters in the trucks.

One night we had a big-pressure event: All the expedition scientists were gathered around the cigarette lighter and we were talking to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and this was big fundraiser/educational event. They had a huge bunch of people asking questions live to the Gobi desert. Everyone is huddled around the Mercedes. (Mercedes gave the Museum these trucks with the cigarette lighters.) So they're all huddled around that thing. And we've got the satellite-phone receiver on the hood of the car with big rocks on it. (We have learned: Paint is not the issue.) But once again, a burst of wind out of nowhere and: Smack-down with the satellite phone! Smashed it. But it survived. Then a few days later that was in my tent. We would keep all the gear in big aluminum cases in our tents all the time unless we were using it. My whole tent got bowled like a beach ball across the Gobi desert. With a hundred pounds of gear in it. Including that satellite phone. By the end we were down quite a few pieces of equipment. That satellite phone made it just barely to the end of the project.

The San Andreas fault was actually even harder, which was surprising to me. We were using cell phones to transmit our stories and photos. There was no service through much of the San Andreas fault zone. And when we could get service, the computer would not talk fast enough to keep the cell phone amused. And the cell phone would shut off and that would crash the computer. Over and over and over and over. The photographer took about 4 hours to send his photographs one night. After that we resorted to our usual fall-back position, which is go knock on somebody's door and try to look cute. (laughter) We do a lot of that, and meet a lot of nice people. And if we can't find anybody nice we rent hotels by the hour. (laughter)

And I actually sometimes dictate if I just can get out. If I can find a phone at all, I'll just dictate to an editor. But you can imagine for a photographer it's a little more challenging. We've had some late-night discussions about just reading off the pixel values. Pixel number 7,458 - that's green. (laughter)

Finally, the category of hazards you are probably dying to know about is the personal hazards.

Number one is just exhaustion. It is a known fact, when you head out on one of these daily reporting things you are going to be totally wiped out and destroyed by the end. Part of it is that you're following somebody else through their day. And their day is probably 10 or 12 or 14 hours long - just to do their thing. And at the end of that when they go have a beer, you sit down and write a story. And that takes a couple hours. And then you fight with the technology, and that can take 15 minutes on a good day, or 4 hours - or forever - on a bad day. It's exhausting.

And add to that that some of these folks are really hard-drivers and they do not rest. Or they hike 20 miles a day. Or they don't care much for nutrition and you know, you eat when you find something. Or they're partying like crazy every night. And all of these things add to your sleep deficit. Sleep takes a real beating on these things. I've slept under trucks on these things. And on the ground in sheep doo in New Zealand.

There are some health issues, too for a lot of these things. And you're sometimes days' worth of travel from a hospital. I've never had an injury, but a friend of mine was thrown down the stairs - they probably have a technical name on a boat for stairs - but it didn't matter to her. She was thrown down 'em and wrenched her knee. She spent four days in her berth unable to leave. You'd never know it from reading her coverage. She didn't miss a beat. She had people bringing her stuff, but she did have surgery when she got home.

Food is always an adventure. In Madagascar we headed off into the rain forest with a blue plastic bucket with chunks of cow in it. In place of refrigeration we had a colander over the bucket. (Laughter) And we just kept chopping up pieces of that cow for days. It was kind nice when it was gone because then we were allowed to kill the rooster that was tied to a bush. (laughter) But after the rooster, we were down to this flat fish that came in plastic bags. Flat dried fish. One of them was so bad that it got flung into the lagoon near where we were camped. And then we ran out of fish. And the fish that had been in the lagoon disappeared - and I think we ate it.

But even on the American Museum of Natural History trip to the Gobi - they take all their own food - but even on that trip people got violently ill with food poisoning.

So how do you cope with this stuff? And why would I ever do it twice?

I try to collect the little miseries and spin them into something fun. And on a slow day I'll put together a story that is just "What you don't know about being on expedition here or there." On the Mongolian expedition, for instance, I did "Life on a dinosaur expedition," something like that. And I talked about the excitement of fossil hunting, which is really just walking for about twelve hours with your head like this (head down). (laughter) And every time you see something white, you bend down to pick it up. And your backpack slides up your back and your water bottle smacks you in the back of the head. And then you picked up a little white rock. That's the excitement of fossil hunting.

I went into personal hygiene. We were carrying all our water with us so showers were not an option. Thirty days. Hygiene really consisted of sitting around the fire at night rubbing those little black logs of grime off your skin.

And then going to the bathroom in the Gobi desert (pause) parts of which are remarkably flat. (laughter)

And that's probably a good place for me to wrap up. Because the fact is for the readers I screen out the really bad stuff and the boredom and the grind and the harassment and the egos and all the nasty stuff. For the readers I screen in the excitement and the fun and the mystery and the silly things and the fun people.

And the fact is that after a couple of weeks at home that's what I'm going to remember too. And then I'm going to hear somebody say, "I'm planning an expedition to outer Spangodia, where there has been a protracted civil war and the only food supply is raw turnips. But we're going to down to this really deep cave for about two weeks, and it's lined with toxic bacteria so you don't want to touch anything. But at bottom we've heard that there may be a new species of spider as big as basketball."

And I think this over and I say, "Take Me!"

Questions and Answers

Question:. I've been enjoying reading Discover magazine. Is that written by freelancers or staffers?

Holmes: . Discovery Channel is different from Discover magazine which is owned by Disney.
A lot of Discover is written by freelancers.

Question: On technique. Do you take a little tape deck while you're out there in the field? Do you take notes while you're out there?

Holmes: If I'm doing a daily report thing, every day is a new story. I'll pick my subject if I can ahead of time. Usually I'll shadow one person every day. If there are a bunch a people on the expedition, they're usually all doing something a little different. And I'll have a new victim every day. And they'll be the focus of that day. I'll take notes like regular story. I don't use tape recorders. Partly because they just get trashed. And I know when the pen's working.

If I'm doing a magazine piece and I don't have to process the information on the spot, I'll usually take a lot more notes, because I don't know what I'll need when I get home.

Question: How did you get into this, and how long have you been doing it?

Holmes: I've been writing professionally since I was a sophomore in college. I started at a local daily paper. I started doing science writing really when Discovery came along, although I had been working at an environmental magazine before that. But Discovery came along and they paid so well. I said I can be a science writer. There is a pretty good market for it.

Question: What's happening with Discovery Online now, with the live Internet stuff?

Holmes: When I finished the dust book last fall it was brilliant timing. Discovery called me up and asked me to go to New Zealand and cover an adventure race. Talk about sleep loss. These people race all day and then they race all night. They never sleep. But it was about a five-day race, and on day three or four my editor called from Bethesda and said. "Don't send in any more stories, we've pretty much had our plugged pulled." Since last November there hasn't been much Discovery Online.

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Created: 7/17/02
Last updated: 7/17/02
Contact: Gail Porter