08 Dec 1999, The Daily Telegraph

How to join an illustrious tribe

Matt Ridley, author of Genome, launches this year's Daily Telegraph / BASF Young Science Writer competition.

By Matt Ridley

MY FIRST piece of advice to somebody intending to become a science writer is to change your name to Steve. Then you might join the illustrious tribe of the best-selling Steves: Gould, Jones, Rose, Pinker, Weinberg and, above all, Hawking.

More seriously, it has been obvious for many years that the quickest route to fame, fortune and fun for a scientist is to write popular books: Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones all did much better than if they had stuck to barnacles, sticklebacks and snails.

The puzzle is not why so many scientists write for the public but why so few do. Writing for the public and not just for other professionals has always been vital to the development of scientific ideas. Think of T H Huxley, H G Wells, J B S Haldane, and more recently Richard Leakey and Jane Goodall. But above all, think of Charles Darwin. When Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace first aired the theory of natural selection at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, nobody took any notice. The president of the society left the meeting lamenting that the year "had not been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, our department of science". Only the next year, with the publication of The Origin of Species, did the storm break and the idea of natural selection begin to flourish.

The Origin was not a peer-reviewed publication; it was a popular best-seller written in haste and published by a commercial publisher. Darwin appealed directly to the public over the heads of a conservative scientific establishment. Gregor Mendel discovered a biological principle just as momentous as Darwin, perhaps even more so. He tried to persuade the great biologists of the day, who told him to stop bothering them. He died unrecognised and remained that way until 1900. He should have written a best-seller.

The Origin of Species was so unpopular with the elite of science that it was "expressly omitted" from the reasons that Darwin was given the Royal Society's Copley Medal five years later. And that, of course, is one reason so few scientists do write about their work in language the rest of us can understand.

They are terrified of the opprobrium of "going popular". As a result, quite a small band of science writers has the field to itself. If you open an obscure journal, say the Journal of Molecular Evolution, and find a paper with a startling and momentous discovery in it, then, like stout Cortez staring at the Pacific, you will be the first person ever to set eyes on it (except, of course, the natives - scientists in that field).

Last year, in that journal, I found a paper describing a new theory about the early history of life on the planet. It argued convincingly that LUCA, the last universal common ancestor of all life, did not look like a bacterium at all, but looked more like a protozoon, and that bacteria are modern, streamlined, advanced descendants of LUCA.

I think I was the first "science writer" to find that story. There are thousands of scientific journals coming out every month, filled with tens of thousands of new ideas. Go mining for them: nobody else will. Even if they are not frightened of being labelled popular, the scientists who do the work are too busy making discoveries to write about them. The more fruitful the field, the less time they have for publicising their work - which is why the race to decipher the human genome this winter, the greatest addition to knowledge of all time, is so inadequately covered by the media.

Finding good ideas for stories is not the problem. The hard part is the writing. My advice is: always dumb down the words; never dumb down the argument. Leave out the jargon, use analogies and metaphors, never say organism when you could say creature, never say cortex when you could say brain; but, on the other hand, never try to fob off readers by cutting to the chase: "Scientists have found a new gene; this could lead to a cure for cancer". Take them through the steps of the argument.

Equally hard is getting published. Book publishers cannot get enough of science these days, but newspaper editors and radio presenters, with honourable exceptions such as Roger Highfield and Melvyn Bragg, are getting worse. "Couldn't you put a bit more of yourself in it?" "Any chance you could do a piece about relationships instead?"

Even when science is making headlines, as in the GM crops debate, the papers and news shows are happy to have acres of stuff about obscure and tedious political developments - committees that deliberate, the self-publicising antics of pressure groups - yet give no space at all to describing and discussing the science itself. Have you read any good accounts of who first genetically modified crops, of how it is done and of what genes are modified? It is so much more interesting.

There is no conventional career path into science writing: no apprenticeships that lead to real jobs. You just have to do it, from a base in another career (student, scientist, journalist or taxi driver), until you are established enough to go freelance. But that is part of what makes it such fun and so free.

The moment it becomes a closed profession, like science itself has become,is the moment it will fossilise. Being a science writer today is a bit like being a scientist a century ago: no grants, no regular jobs, just living by your wits.

We popular science writers are parasites, feeding off the research of real scientists. But if we do it well, we can not only do them a service by putting their discoveries into wider circulation (turning parasitism into symbiosis), but we can add value too. We can look over the fences that academics build between disciplines and see where convergent thoughts can be brought together. Science is a like a posh suburb: nobody knows what their neighbours do. There is a role for those who take a broad view.

But more than that, we can be science critics. Too many science writers just sit at their masters' knees and write down at face value what the scientist says. You would not accept a theatre or art critic who did that. The populariser must join the debate, too. Subjects such as evolutionary psychology and global warming are not facts to be handed down on tablets of stone; they are debates to be joined and some of the best protagonists are writers rather than scientists: people such as Colin Tudge, Nigel Calder and Robert Wright.

One thing I have found invaluable in science writing (indeed in any kind of journalism) is a strong sense of scepticism about conventional wisdom. Very few journalists think for themselves; they follow the herd. A truly original science writer should not be able to see a consensus without wanting to tilt his lance at it.

Global warming? Try listening to the sceptics. Genetically modified food? Investigate the possibility that it will actually be good for the environment. Crop circles? Entertain the thought that they are all man-made. This is not, of course, a foolproof instinct, but you will be surprised how often you find you have stumbled on a scandalously neglected part of the debate.

The sponsor for this competition, BASF, is part of the chemical industry, which knows a thing or two about being unfashionable. It is amazingly hard these days to persuade editors and readers that far from dying of chemical-induced cancers, we keep getting healthier and greener because of innovation in the chemical industry - yet it's true.

Science is not a catalogue of facts; it is a process by which new mysteries are discovered and new questions posed. Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered: it is the next piece of ignorance that drives them on.

Science is like a clearing in a forest: the more trees of mystery we cut down, the longer the perimeter of the clearing and the more there is to see. We can give people a glimpse of the mysteries and uncertainties at the frontier of science. That is why people buy the Steves' books - not to be told the facts, but to share in the excitement of the mysteries.