ABSTRACT
I wanted to be a science writer for the same reason that many people probably wanted to be scientists. For my generation, at least in our youth, truth and beauty were as one. I dabbled in poetry and paleontology, astronomy and architecture. I fi nally chose writing because it gave me art and science as well. I’d never heard the phrase ‘science writer’ but science was always my subject. When I went into daily newspapering in the late 1960s I told my editor I wanted to be a science writer. He grunted and said the paper didn’t need one of those. But history was against him, and the young kid he’d hired had a talent for fi nding science in any story he was assigned. Early on I turned a story about the city’s rat eradication program into a piece that could have blended seamlessly with Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History. In my hands a zoning story metamorphosed into a piece on urban demographics. A school bond issue assignment came back to my editor in the form of an un-rejectable profi le of a chemistry teacher. The editors grumbled but the readers loved it and soon everyone outside the paper referred to me as a ‘science writer’. I will never forget the great victory it was, the fi rst time my boss called me that. Or at least it seemed a victory at the time. Now it makes me incomparably sad. I was so young. We all were. And so, then, was our world.
