The Best Australian Science Writing 2012

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Introduction:

Masters of the popular treatise

Elizabeth Finkel

‘I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work,’ opined Charles Darwin.

Indeed Darwin was a master of the popular treatise. His On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, was a best-seller. Take a look at his closing paragraph and you get an inkling why:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Look at the passion and poetry of his writing. Origin was a 650-page tome meticulously detailing the evidence for evolution from examples gathered from the natural world and from domestic breeding. Yet the tome does not weigh you down. Neither his weighty knowledge nor the passage of two centuries presents any barrier to the modern reader. Darwin’s voice is vibrant, and astoundingly ‘present’.

Clear explanation, storytelling and passion are the pillars of great science writing. And in this anthology of Australian science writing you’ll find many examples. Of course the stories selected here reflect my own inevitable quirks, interests and biases. So before we go on, let me give you a bit of the backstory to your editor.

I spent a decade in labs doing research in biochemistry and genetics and another couple writing about other people’s research. I write for scientific audiences, mostly for the US magazine Science, and for lay audiences, mostly in the journal COSMOS Magazine, which I co-founded. I’ve also written two popular science books. Because of my association with COSMOS Magazine and the inescapable fact that many Australian science writers are friends and colleagues, there is a potential ‘conflict of interest’ in the selection of these stories. That’s been addressed by vetting the stories with the advisory panel. I relied on my august advisors to detect any second-rate material that might have breached my subjective filter.

If I do have a bias, it is for muscular writing – the well-researched, well-told tale. Because like Darwin, I believe science writing has a hefty job to do. It must translate the often controversial and confronting science of the times, bringing it to a community that includes not only the curious layperson but also politicians and policymakers. As in Darwin’s time, it is no trivial matter. Scientific ideas shape everything from understanding how we became Homo sapiens to passing laws on genetic privacy, gene patents, carbon taxes, cloning, GMOs, nanotechnology, germ warfare … to name just the ones kicking around my head at this very moment.

And of course science writers also have to titillate, to make people want to read their stories. Otherwise what’s the point? All the storyteller’s crafts need to be put into play, just as Darwin instinctively knew to do.

Among the storytellers featured here, you’ll hear two main types of voices. One is the journalistic voice, the traveller in an unknown country who reports earnestly and colourfully on their findings and who, as our proxy, asks and answers the questions we would like to ask: brave travellers such as Corey Butler enduring close encounters with creepy crawlies while tagging along on a wildlife inventory of a vast former South Australian cattle station, or Wendy Zukerman, who after encountering fornicating cockroaches in her midnight kitchen, explores the secret of their success. Or there’s Ashley Hay taking us along for the ride in Cairns with a team who are releasing mozzies infected with Wolbachia bacteria. A gift from nature, Wolbachia, once lodged in its mozzie host, stops it from spreading dengue virus.

Leaving the very popular realm of creepy crawly science, Wilson da Silva delivers a thrilling eyewitness account of the launch of the space shuttle at Cape Canaveral. No one but da Silva could have authored this piece. It’s a fulfilment of his life-long dream to witness a space shuttle launch. But it’s tempered with pathos: this was the last launch. With Christine Kenneally, the CSI lab meets the stuff of legend. Ned Kelly’s bones were lost in the dark mists of time, but the passage of one and a third centuries is no impediment to the modern DNA test. It nailed the long-lost bones, bringing Kelly to life once more.

Harrowing, but with deadly accuracy, the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster Contagion painted a picture of what a killer flu pandemic would be like. Nick Miller takes us behind the scenes to the real-world drama of battling viral pandemics. We get a closeup view of American virus hunter Ian Lipkin, who served as the model for one of the key characters in the movie.

Jo Chandler, brave soul that she is, travels to the Antarctic to experience climate science in the raw. For anyone jaded by climate science, her insider’s perspective – she is a senior writer for The Age – on the media’s treatment of this science is galvanising. Freed from the constraints of the broadsheet we hear Chandler in full voice, setting the standard for long-form science journalism.

Richard Lovett takes us to Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, whose tantalising chemical signature was read for the first time by the Cassini space probe in 2005. It turns out Enceladus is the solar system’s best candidate for finding alien life!

Adrian Hyland travels the still raw emotional landscape of Black Saturday, 7 February 2009, when the state of Victoria ignited into an inferno that claimed 173 lives. As any therapist will tell you, ‘analysis’ is a key part of recovering from trauma. In this case Hyland does it though a scientific prism. Why is Australia the most fire-prone nation on Earth?

Fire yes, but earthquakes? Emma Young reveals that Australia – though not fractured by a tectonic plate – experiences far more than it should and scientists are not sure why. Part of the reason is that the capacious Indo-Australian plate on which Australia rides is colliding with the Eurasian, Philippines and Pacific plates to the northeast. Startlingly, another reason may be mining – perhaps it was a contributor to the level 5 quake that rocked Kalgoorlie in 2010?

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The other voice, well represented here, is the authoritative voice of the scientist. He or she has a head start. Knowledge is theirs – and passion too; otherwise why would they put up with the poor pay and tyranny of incessant research grant deadlines? But do they have the storyteller’s gift? Some do. And thanks to publications like The Conversation, more and more of their voices are spilling out of the labs. Take a look at the exuberant tone of Helen Maynard-Casely, writing about the alien life that might be discovered in Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. Its icy 4km crust has just been breached after 20 years of drilling! Below lies an environment not unlike the ocean beneath the icy crust of Europa – one of the ‘lover’ moons of Jupiter. If life is indeed discovered in Lake Vostok, it will cue exobiologists for what to search for on Europa. Or join Jonathan Carroll, trying to make sense of the faster-than-light neutrinos reported this year. It was the most extraordinary science story of the year! And it is intriguing to hear his perspective. How does a working physicist respond when one of the pillars of his discipline is rocked? Then there is Peter McAllister, having some fun with his anthropology. He ponders (as I must confess I have) what it was like in the days when men were men. How well-endowed, for instance, were the rowers of the Ancient Greek triremes? With superhuman strength, it seems. Modern athletes can manage 6 knots for an hour; the Athenians could keep up 7–8 knots for a 12 hour sea crossing!

In a more serious tone we hear from Frank Bowden, an infectious diseases physician who chose a really bad time for his sabbatical: Australia’s 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak. While his wife – an infection control practitioner – battled at the frontline, Bowden stayed at home to observe the epidemic at arm’s length. His report paints an unsettling picture. In the aftermath, a common criticism was that institutions over-reacted and that millions of dollars were wasted in unused vaccines. Bowden reminds us that 722 people had to be admitted to intensive care and 103 of them died, including seven pregnant women and seven children. If the flu strain had been just a little more virulent (and it was impossible to predict at the time) those dollars would be ‘petty cash’.

Which brings us to yet another type of voice: the science writer on a mission. The pen is powerful. And some of the voices in this anthology – both scientific and journalistic – are using it for all it’s worth.

Journalists Craig Cormick and Cassandra Wilkinson take on the irrational element in their diatribes. Cormick explores why it is that clever people believe in silly things such as, for instance, not vaccinating their children. Dismayingly, his analysis seems to affirm Jonathan Swift’s aphorism: ‘You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.’ Vaccination refusers are likely to spend lots of time educating themselves on the internet – but by reading material that supports their position. Feisty Cassandra Wilkinson pulls no punches in her argument that the public health dollar should not be squandered on treatments with no proven benefit, like homeopathy. Pharmacologist Ian Musgrave explains why: homeopathy, a relic of mediaeval alchemy, is a practice at odds with the laws of physics and chemistry.

But mainstream medicine is not perfect either.

GP Pamela Douglas admits us into her world for a closeup view of how medicine is susceptible to fashions that are not based on proven effectiveness, safety or common sense. Her case study is ‘infant reflux’, or colic. She observes how doctors went from offering barley water and reassuring mums that their babies would outgrow it, to the widespread treatment of newborns with drugs in the 1990s – a practice that has since been abandoned. Tim Bohane, a Sydney-based paediatric gastroenterologist, commented, ‘I would love all medical students, and indeed budding paediatric gastroenterologists, to digest this article.’

Oncologist Ranjana Srivastava also takes us into her consulting room. Textbooks do not help her counsel her dying patients. Their journeys are unique and uniquely challenging for the young doctor. But writing does help. Srivastava writes because she is ‘unable to close the door to the mind’.

In a more light-hearted tone, evolutionary biologist Michael Kasumovic goes on the warpath in defence of video games. Tired of the reigning wisdom that video games are likely to leave a child with the sensory and moral development of a mole rat, he surveys the scientific literature to show that on the contrary, gamers are not more likely to become sociopaths – many of them are college professors, bankers … and even evolutionary biologists.

Rob Brooks, another evolutionary biologist, has a more serious mission in mind: saving the planet. He is terrified by the birth of the seven billionth person – an event that happened on 30 October 2011. How will we sustain the growing population when over a billion already live on less than a dollar a day? Empower women, says Brooks. Give them access to contraception, education and employment and they will have fewer, bettertended children.

William Laurance, a conservation biologist, is on a mission to save the planet’s rainforests. Not only are they home to endangered species like orangutans and tree kangaroos; they also keep the planet cool by locking up carbon and exhaling water vapour to make clouds. He champions economic instruments like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) as a way to trade forests for carbon credits. True, such instruments are too often rorted, but they can be policed through satellite surveillance and the upside is huge. For developing nations, rainforests could become even more valuable than the farmland that’s replacing them.

Journalist Julian Cribb wields his pen for the planet in a way that might have been inspired by Gandhi’s admonition: ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’ Cribb pens a picture of Australia’s golden age in 2050 when science and sustainability are the driving forces behind a thriving economy, agriculture, medicine and the arts.

Astrophysicist Matthew Bailes makes it his mission to expose the fickleness of the media. After discovering a new ‘diamond’ planet last year, Bailes suddenly became a media darling: the journalists were wowed by the idea of a diamond planet. But he reflects that when it comes to climate science, the sexier spin is to cast doubt on the findings. Bailes’ story certainly struck a chord. It’s had over 69,000 readers, 2600 tweets, and been ‘liked’ 6700 times on Facebook!

Finally we come to my ‘idiosyncratic’ collection. After 15 years of carefully filing away letters from fringe physicists, Margaret Wertheim – a writer on the history and philosophy of physics – could stand it no longer. Surrendering to curiosity, she set off to explore the ideas of one Jim Carter, a man with no formal training who had conceived an alternative theory of the universe. ‘Physics on the fringe’ is an excerpt from the book born of that journey. True, Carter’s theories are wacky, but so is some mainstream physics. Think of ‘string theory’, which explains the universe by invoking 11 dimensions. As Wertheim muses on Carter through her ‘history of science’ prism, we not only learn something about the evolution of ideas, but here, stripped of all its academic robes and unaided by fancy machines, we get close up and personal with the raw scientific impulse.

I can well understand Wertheim’s compulsion to explore the fringe. Though Carter is a stand-out ‘fringe’ physicist, it is not always so clear-cut. Over and over again in stories I cover, I meet scientists who proudly declare their ‘outsider’ position. Are they the next Barry Marshall, seeing what others have failed to see and on their way to a Nobel Prize? Or are they quirky misfits with a wire loose somewhere? The line between ‘cutting edge’ and ‘fringe’ can be hard to discern. And who am I to judge?

Two more little odd bods and we’re done. One is from Lachlan Bolt, who was just 12 years old when he penned his ‘wee story’, an entry into a Double Helix magazine science writing competition. What a command of writing and what a good mind!

And finally to the sublime. As Darwin showed us, science writing can be beautiful. When you come to the end of the anthology, still your mind for a moment with the beauty of Vanessa Mickan’s ‘Dream of goldfinches’.

Storytelling

Scientists with a cause

Muscular writing

Gateway to heaven

Wilson da Silva

If humanity has a beachhead to the stars, this is it: Cape Canaveral. This sandy promontory, jutting out into the Atlantic from a barrier island on the midway point of Florida’s eastern coast, is the site of most of the manned space launches in human history.

Inhabited for more than 12,000 years, and the scene of some of the first encounters between Europeans and Native Americans, it’s often hot and humid, a lowland speckled with marshy lagoons in every direction. Often sunny year-round, it’s also prone to sudden thunderstorms and lightning.

To the north is the Canaveral National Seashore, a national park of pristine beaches and sand dunes that are sanctuary to an abundance of wildlife, from dolphins and manatees to giant sea turtles. It’s a spawning ground for saltwater fish, and alligators swim the rivers and lagoons. It is from this subtropical setting that more than 880 passengers have been lofted into the cold of space.

As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to come here to see a manned launch. And ever since staying up as a child to watch live pictures on TV of the first space shuttle heaving into the sky in April 1981, I’ve wanted – most of all – to see a shuttle launch.

So here I was, 30 years later, as the bold – and at times tragic – era of the shuttle draws to a close, and with the last three remaining orbiters facing retirement, finally ready to see my first manned launch, and my first shuttle takeoff. I’d come to see the farewell flight of Discovery, the most travelled and successful of them all.

Discovery was the third shuttle to join the fleet, and made her maiden voyage in August 1984 – when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Bob Hawke was in his first term as prime minister, sprinter Carl Lewis had just won four gold medals at the Los Angeles Olympics, apartheid reigned in South Africa and Prince’s Purple Rain was top of the charts.

The actual spacecraft is even older: construction began in August 1979, based on designs proposed a decade earlier. In fact, the whole fleet’s tailor-made onboard avionics computer had 424 kilobytes of magnetic core memory, could process 400,000 instructions per second, had no hard drive, and loaded software from magnetic tape. Upgrades in 1990 boosted memory capacity to about 1 megabyte and processor speed to 1.2 million instructions per second.

Considering how often the space shuttle is billed as the most complex vehicle ever built, and its decades-long poster child status for everything futuristic, it’s amazing just how much of a technological relic it is. My iPhone has more memory than the avionics!

But it was the first civilian craft to use a computerised fly-bywire digital flight control system, with no mechanical or hydraulic links between the pilot’s joystick and the control surfaces or thrusters – the kind we take for granted on modern aeroplanes. It did not burn out its heat shield on re-entry, and it was the first reusable spacecraft.

Since its maiden flight, Discovery has completed 39 missions, making it the most successful in NASA’s fleet. It benefited from lessons learned in the construction and testing of its sister craft, which is why it weighs some 3000kg less than the first shuttle, Columbia.

Unofficially, it’s considered ‘the lucky shuttle’: after the disasters that destroyed Challenger at takeoff in 1986 and Columbia on re-entry in 2003 (its two sisters from the original fleet of three), Discovery was twice chosen to restart the shuttle program.

And she has indeed had a colourful run: launching the Hubble Space Telescope, flying the first female shuttle pilot, Eileen Collins (who also became the first female shuttle commander, also aboard Discovery). It was the first – and the last – shuttle to dock with Mir, Russia’s space station, put Australia’s first communications satellite, Aussat 1, into orbit, twice repaired Hubble, and was the first shuttle to dock with the International Space Station. It flew the highest altitude, and carried the oldest human into space: John Glenn, who was 77 and a US Senator at the time, and who had made his name as the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962.

‘It’s just amazing what this vehicle can do,’ astronaut Eric Boe, the pilot for Discovery’s final flight, told a news conference. ‘It can launch like a rocket, go into orbit, change into a spacecraft and then land as a hypersonic airplane. What’s amazing is just how well she sails. It’s an honour and privilege for all of us to get the chance to fly on her final