"Seeing how difficult science is was illuminating"

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Roberta Kwok, author of our August book of the month, Lost in Curiosity. If you’ve had a chance to read it, or followed along with my close reads, you’ll know that it’s a fantastic look at how science is actually done—the hard, complicated, and messy method by which knowledge is created. (And if you haven’t read it, copies are now available in our store, by the way!)

We chatted about all manner of things, from what it took to produce her long views of science in action to the hard and soft politics of research and many things in between.

What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

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Tell me a little bit about where this book began. Was there a formative moment, a motivation at the beginning of it all?

Roberta Kwok: It really does go back to that scene on the very first page of the introduction. This is 20 years ago, 2006, I'm a MFA student in creative writing. I've got this friend Ben who's an evolutionary biologist, and I follow him around on his sunflower experiment where various things go wrong, and then he realizes, OK: all the work that we just did probably has to be thrown out, and I’ve got to do it again. 

I knew a little bit about how frustrating and challenging science could be because I studied biology in college and I worked in a couple of labs. But I just was not very good at it, and that's why I switched to other things. But Ben reminded me of how messy and sometimes chaotic the process can be. 

If you fast forward about 10 years to when I'm a science journalist, I'm still thinking about that night with the sunflowers. I'm still remembering that experience. When you start out as a science journalist, you're writing news stories—a new study comes out, you talk to the researcher for maybe like 30 minutes or an hour, you type up your 800 word piece: There's a nice little headline, and it tells you what they found, but usually doesn’t go into a lot of depth about  what happened before that. How much did you have to do in order to come up with that result? 

I guess it was around 2018 where I started thinking I would like to do something similar to what I did with Ben—because I did write an essay that came out of that—and I want to do that for a bunch of chapters. So it ended up being nine chapters where I'm following a different team or different researcher for each chapter.

But there's a difference between thinking that would be a nice idea, and getting it done. How do you take that to a publisher and say, “I want to tell a story in which nothing many people try but don't really succeed in the thing they do”? That's a difficult pitch to make. 

Yeah, it is a difficult pitch. In terms of my own craft and feeling like maybe there was a light switch? I don't think I really knew that it was going to work until it was done. had to trust a little bit—it's almost like science, right? You have this hypothesis, you have this idea you want to explore, and you sort of trust that if you do enough, if you do enough experiments, and you keep trying again and again, you'll end up with something. And I think it was the same with this book. 

Prior to getting the book deal I had done two sample chapters, the paleontology one about lystrosaurus and the climate change one about the Emerald Tutus, where they're in the wave lab in Oregon. Those had some like local reporting, so that was fairly easy-ish to sort of do the reporting close to home and get those squared away. But I would say even for those, it took a very long time to figure out the voice and the structure. How am I going to tell this? How am I going to frame this? How am I going to make this into a narrative? 

When I initially pitched it, the title was Minutia, and the subtitle was something like “the tiny details that scientists pursue to answer big questions.” So I always had this idea of the “messy middle,” the opposite of the eureka moment. But I also had this sort of competing idea of scientists looking at things at such a precise, exacting level in order to answer bigger questions. So I think that made it difficult to figure out how do I focus the chapter? 

Maybe when I started reporting more, like the geology chapter, the Greenland glaciologists, the exomoon scientists, the frog researcher in Borneo… it's hard to remember now, but at some point what stood out to me was the most interesting thing about this, the most compelling thing is the challenges that they are facing and have to overcome and and how they do that. So it was an exploration. 

It feels natural and kind of obvious in retrospect that the struggle the scientist is going through, that's the story. It's not the grand narrative of their discovery, it’s the day-to-day challenges and struggles that they're facing. Yet that’s really not the way that most science writing is done; it's always this sort of “narrative backfill” where you start with the end and go back to reconstruct it. So, when you were reporting these particular stories, were you approaching it from a traditional science journalism lens, or were these special to the book?

For a few chapters, I had done some reporting on some aspect or some earlier project. So in the exomoon chapter one of the main characters is David Kipping, an astronomer. I had done a blog post, I think, about chasing transits—these were exoplanet transits, not exomoons—but they were looking for the passage of a planet across its star, and David Kipping was caught up in that whole effort. He mentioned, almost as a throwaway near the end, that his next thing he was going to search for was exomoons. So I knew a little bit about the backstory, but going in it was a whole new story because he's got this whole new question now.

So I guess the roots of some stories were established already, and in some cases I was joining right in the middle: I knew that David Kipping had already put forth one or two exomoon candidates at the time, and there was some confusion or discussion over them. Some people were critical of his work, so I knew that that would have to be reconstructed. But I didn't know what was going to happen going forward.

The chemistry chapter was another one. One of the main characters there is Jani Ingram, she's this chemist who does work on the Navajo Nation, looking at how uranium is contaminating water and plants there. I had interviewed her for a small piece of a bigger feature about scientists, a kids' science feature, actually. But I knew she'd had all these grad students who came through her lab, many of whom were also indigenous, also studying the effects on their community, and so then went back and sort of you know tracked down all those people and found a graduate student who is now doing her own line of research on medicinal plants. 

I would say that for the majority of the narrative, I didn't know what was going to happen. I just kind of hoped that something interesting would emerge from the reporting.

I think that that sort of longitudinal approach really pays off. There's a non-judgmental quality to sitting with these folks, seeing their persistence and your persistence… Sometimes it goes places, and sometimes it seems incredibly frustrating for the scientists, and yet that honesty is what makes it the complete picture. Can you give us an idea of how long you were sitting with these people, or how often you were talking to them?

The entire process of reporting and writing the book would have been roughly 2018 to 2024. Sometimes there were different things happening within that time, and sometimes I would wrap up a chapter and move on to the next one. You wrote that newsletter article about the physics chapter, and after I read it, I was thinking how many times did I talk to Madeline, who's the main physicist, for that? 

It looks like I contacted her in 2021, and we wrapped up around 2024, so about three years. I did about 10 interviews with her throughout the course of that, and each one was maybe an hour. I also did a field reporting trip out to her lab and her collaborator's lab at some point, and I sat in on about 15 of their Zoom meetings. And that material all had to be sort of shaped and condensed. I wouldn't say that that was the routine for all of them, but that's just an example of one. But I feel like the longer I was able to follow a researcher and the more often I was able to talk to them, the better the story was, the better the chapter was.

Did any of them stand out particularly? Did any of them take that whole six year period?

Those two sample chapters that I wrote early on, those probably occupied like the first couple of years because I was really only working very part time on it. So maybe it was probably more all happening like 2020 to 2024 for for most of them,

Did the pandemic make it easier to get access in a way? Suddenly everyone moved to Zoom then. 

I don't know if they were always on Zoom frequently with each other, or if before that they would have been calling each other, just arguing with each other. One chapter that is set during the pandemic itself, the molecular biology one, where I am calling researchers around the world who are sequencing SARS-CoV-2 sequences, I'm sure the whole Zoom boom during that time made that easier because everyone at that point was used to doing video calls, and so I was able to connect with them that way.

Do you have any tricks for persuasion? I can imagine if you said to them “I really want to follow your work for three years” they would feel both flattered and weirded out. What conversations did you have with them?

I hope I wasn't tricking them! I don't think I really had to persuade them. I did tell them that what I'm interested in is seeing the scientific process in action, and the challenges that brings, and how those are overcome. I think it helped that I was reaching out generally to younger researchers, junior researchers who have probably just got more time to speak to a journalist. 

And I was reaching out to so many people: I would say that for each chapter, I probably interviewed at least half a dozen potentials before figuring out who I am going to follow. So there's sort of a filtering process there, right? Who even responds to the request? Who's happy to chat? Who do I feel like a connection with over the phone? 

Some of them, I think, liked having those conversations. Madelyn, the physicist, is one of those. They, I mean, they're dealing with so many obstacles and frustrations, and I don't think maybe in some sense it's helpful to have someone to talk about that. Madelyn, I think at some point, said it was like therapy.

I can imagine your approach felt pretty refreshing to them. That's probably quite unusual to someone who's used to saying “here are the three things that I learned that your readers need to know about this study that I did.”

Were you worried at any point that a project you were following would be too successful? That they would solve this massive problem, and then that wouldn't quite fit into the rest of the book?

I never thought of that as a potential problem because I feel like it never works out! Even if they get to some kind of massive breakthrough at the end, I know that there's so much that has to go into it, and it's just inevitable that there's going to be twists and turns.

Were there stories or scientists that you followed but didn't make the cut when you came to putting the book together?

No. I had a limited time frame to write the book: once I had the book deal, I had a deadline, which was horrifying. And so once I had chosen these characters, and I felt like I had done enough to say, OK, there's something here, I'm interested, I want to follow these people I had to just blindly commit and trust that something would emerge from that. I suppose if one of them really had just gone off the rails—maybe I didn't have access any more or something—I would have had to put it aside. But that thankfully didn't happen. 

I will say some chapters went through like a lot, a lot, of revision. Like the Covid chapter originally. I'm in the Seattle area, and the team that runs the Nextstrain website was maybe not famous, but really well-known during the pandemic. This computational biologist, Trevor Bedford, was on social media all the time, and they were running all these analyses.

Initially, it was just going to be about them; I interviewed all their team members. I think it was based on maybe some feedback that I got from my writing group, but I thought what if you expand this globally? Think about all the other researchers who are doing similar things around the world in other countries. Are there different lessons that you can bring out of those groups and fit that into a bigger story? So some of those Nextstrain interviews had to kind of drop away because I was making space for this new cast of characters.

You said you have a background in biology. Were there journeys you learned more from? You're sitting there in 15 meetings with theoretical physicists and mathematicians… was that a crash course in mathematics, or did you come out of it thinking—and maybe I'm projecting a little bit—I still don't really understand what this crucial piece of math is.

You are not projecting! With the physics meetings, I really didn't understand most of what was being said. I could understand pieces of it but I guess what I was trying to gather from those meetings was things that seemed like turning points, things that seemed like emotional reactions to what was going on, maybe sparring or debating over certain ideas.

One of the reasons I had to talk to Madelyn so many times was because after those meetings, I would have to go back to her and say, "OK, so when you guys were talking about this, did you mean this?” and she would have to—I mean, bless her heart for being so patient—explain what had happened in the meeting to me, so that I could render it accurately on the page.

In some cases, I didn't really try: I'm just sort of quoting what they say, and there isn't really an attempt for me or the reader to understand it, but it's almost just like background scenery, like “this is how businesses talk.”

Which of the stories hit you deepest? Were there any that you got more attached to than the others, or expressed something that you found personally important?

It's hard to choose, but I will say the Greenland chapter. I don't think I had fully appreciated what it took behind the scenes to gather this data that eventually makes it onto the pages of a journal article. Of course, I’ve read the headlines about glaciers, sea level rise, and so on, and you sort of see the results reported. But to really see how much they went through to gather those, in some cases maybe just a few scraps of data, that was illuminating and surprising. Just to see how difficult that was. 

I also really loved reporting the evolutionary biology chapter on the frogs in Borneo. It's just fun to follow someone who's so obsessed with a question, with a species, with a certain animal, with their behavior, and to see them try to follow that passion—and somewhere as fascinating as the Borneo rainforest obviously helps as well. Joanna, the biologist, was willing to open up to me about the obstacles that she was facing and how she was feeling about it. That did make me feel emotionally attached to what was happening to her research. 

That chapter was a reminder that being a scientist is a job; you still have to deal with bosses you don't like, you’re always trying to get more funding, grants depend on publishing, the cycle of academia. I wondered how much the soft politics of science became visible to you that hadn't before. Was that something you were aware of before?

I think with the frog chapter it does come up in the sense that she's dealing with bureaucratic stuff. She can't do this without the right permit. She needs to get the right visa to get there. Some of it is funding, too: I think she couldn't find a job immediately after grad school, and so you know just getting the funds and the sort of legal framework in place to actually do her work was definitely part of what was holding her back. 

For other chapters, it didn't necessarily come up as a major obstacle during that time period. So for the most part, they must have already pretty much had their funding in place. They knew what they were going to do, and it was a matter of just executing on it. That, of course, creates its own stress because you've gotten this pot of money and you're expected to sort of have something to show for that. 

Let’s shift from the soft politics to the hard politics of it. We're in a very peculiar environment now with science funding and research funding and the relationship between government and science. How did scientists respond to the arrival of the book?

I haven't heard a ton of direct comments from scientists. What's interesting reading reader reviews on Goodreads is that people haven't really brought up politics, and maybe they almost see the book as an escape or something from all of that because it was written pre- this era. 

I've heard from some of the scientists who were featured in the book, and if I'm remembering correctly, they appreciated the fact that it was showing how science is done, and I guess they were hoping that it would show the public what scientists do and how important their work is. So I think that's the hope. I don't know if the people that they would want to read the book would actually read the book.

Personally it drives me absolutely mad that when a grant is made, some people will say “How can we spend $50,000 to study frog genetics?” or whatever. The numbers that get talked about are usually so small, and people need to eat, people need to have a place to do their work. These are just the costs of people living and thinking about these things. It adds up, you know. It’s not like an NIH grant for X amount of dollars all goes into a nice renovation on the house of the principal investigator. It's just people doing a job. 

While that’s not political in and of itself, we're in an environment where it is almost a political statement to just show like here's what really goes on behind the scenes.

It was a conscious choice to tell the junior researchers' stories, the graduate students, and the postdocs who do the grunt work. Because yes, you have to pay these people, and they need to eat and live, like you said. They're the ones on the ground in the lab, collecting the data.It takes a tremendous amount of effort to do that, and time.

What's what's next? What are you spending your time on at the minute?

I’m just emerging from book launch, really. I was freelancing before this, so I'm going to go back, start ramping that up again. I would like to give some talks about this, maybe at university, and think about expanding this into some kind of material that I could present something about the scientific process that maybe shows people here's what happens when you go behind the scenes of science. I also do writing on economics and finance for business schools, and I teach writers and artists about investing, retirement planning. This is a complete aside, but since you asked, that is part of what occupies my time!

Longer term, like I'm not thinking about creative work right now because I feel sort of tapped out from writing the whole book. But I don't know… I started out as a fiction writer and I want to go back, maybe not to fiction writing, but essay writing, flash essays, something a little bit more creative in terms of form and genre. I think it would be interesting to experiment with that a little bit, but that's farther farther down the road.

Curious Reading Club is all about recommending books. So is there a book that you found inspirational in the writing of Lost in Curiosity?

There's a constellation of authors that I'm inspired by, and they all have different styles. One book that I had read recently when I was starting on this was Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght, which is an incredible science narrative. He's a scientist himself, so he's there on the ground for the entire thing. I'm always drawn to these human stories about science, and he just does that brilliantly, so that was a source of inspiration. 

I was also inspired by World of Wonders. I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce the author's name, so I'm not going to try! [It’s World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil] It's a series of very short essays about the natural world, and it's more like memoir. I wanted to capture that same feeling of awe and wonder that she exudes through the book. That book is also illustrated, so I wanted that same sort of visual component to my book—that's why I wanted internal illustrations as well. 

And is there a book that you turn to regularly? One that has a personal power or connection for you, or that you go back to for inspiration or excitement or solace?

It is so hard to pick one. I'll maybe do a couple. A book that I've re-read multiple times that has nothing to do with science is called Love Nina by Nina Stibbe, and it's just charming. It's the letters that she wrote to her sister while she was a nanny living in London, and she's a nanny to these two boys and their mother. It sounds boring because like nothing really happens in this book, but it's just so delightful to see these people talking to each other over dinner, interacting, and the scenes that emerge from that. If people are needing escape and lightness right now, that's a great one. 

I love On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I am drawn in general to comedic writers, and I need lightness of touch in a novel to lift my spirits, I guess. I tried to bring a little of that to the book just because some of the subject matter is so serious, but I didn't want it to be just a depressing read.

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OK, now there are a few titles on my to-be-read pile! Thanks so much to Roberta for taking the time to chat—and for writing her terrific book. If you want even more Roberta, may I point you in the direction of a “day in life” Q&A she did with The Open Notebook recently. Next week I’ll get back to looking at September’s book of the month, Soldiers & Kings… a very different prospect from all this science talk.

Onwards

Bobbie