My science colleagues asked me how I could switch from research to stories – from science to fiction and back again – as if the two activities were so different that the same person couldn’t do them both. My answer was usually, "I don't know. I just sit at my desk and start writing and [...]
Bob Bausch (left), friend and author, and I at a writer's workshop in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. In my last blog of this series, I'd broken the ice and started writing fiction. But I needed to find a way to fit writing into my busy schedule as a scientist and to learn the [...]
My growing interest in Inuit sculptures became the springboard into my life as a writer.
I was not a bookworm as I grew up. I read relatively little and wrote only one ‘term paper’ in high school. At best I skimmed the assigned readings over the summer vacations in high school. Thus, my freshman course at Harvard requiring that we write an essay every two weeks throughout the semester was [...]
In his classic The Sense of an Ending (2000), the literary critic Frank Kermode discussed the idea that scientists connect discrete observations as a form of “concord-fiction.” He used Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – that electrons possess the mutually exclusive properties of waves and particles – as an example. How can we conceptualize an electron as [...]
This is my first blog entry of a series considering my journey from research scientist to writer. A year or so after closing my research laboratory and becoming an emeritus scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I was browsing in the bookstore in Point Reyes, a cozy California nook about an hour’s drive [...]
