SciLogs goes kaput, Game of Genomes is an ambitious science writing oddity

A SCIENCE BLOG NETWORK GOES KAPUT

SciLogs, one of the few remaining science blog networks, will cease to publish on September 1. It began as part of the Nature Network but more recently as been lodged at Spektrum der Wissenschaft, which publishes several German-language science journals.

The reason SciLogs is coming to an end is not terribly complicated. Spektrum took on this network of English-language blogs in hopes of broadening readership of its own German-language journals. Perhaps not surprisingly, the plan didn't work. So, kaput.

SciLogs manager Paige Jarreau said in her farewell post at her blog From the Lab Bench, "The shutting down of SciLogs.com is not a sign that science blogs are dying (because they aren't), or even that science blog networks are dying."

She expanded on that last point in an email to me. "I'm not sure that the need for a blogging network is as great today (from the media outlet's point of view – not the bloggers' view) as it used to be before Twitter, social networking sites, etc. Maybe 5-10 years ago, media outlets were more excited about bringing blogs together into Networks to drive traffic, because readers might visit these networks directly to keep up with multiple blogs and from there read the magazine content, etc. Today, readers use social networking sites to keep up with many blogs."

Like several other SciLogs bloggers, Jarreau will continue to blog in a different locale. In future, find From the Lab Bench here.

Another SciLogs blogger, Susan Swanberg, told me in an email, "SciLogs gave us quite a bit of freedom to write about what we wanted to write. It was also, for me, a way to develop topics about which I'm now writing scholarly articles. It's very sad to see SciLogs go. Every time another science writing or science journalism light goes out, I mourn."

Swanberg will be moving her blog, The Tenacious Telomere, to The Fourth Helix ("A Science Site for Baby Boomers") in September.

Other SciLogs bloggers have also announced moves. Matt Shipman's Communications Breakdown will change its name to Science Communication Breakdown and move here. Plant biologist Ian Street's The Quiet Branches will be found here.

If you're a SciLogs blogger who plans to continue blogging elsewhere, please let us know your new URL in the Comments.

GAME OF GENOMES. A PARTIAL RANT

A notable three-part science writing project began this week at STAT: Carl Zimmer's account of what's in his own genome. It took several months and the labor of dozens of scientists, not to mention big sequencing machines and probably a fair amount of money, just to assemble Zimmer's DNA and its various analyses to the point where he could begin to do what science writers do: view it, think about it, and ask scientists questions about it.

The project is therefore different in both scope and depth from previous personal accounts of encounters with one's very own genome. It's in three parts that each qualify as longform. The first appeared last Monday, July 11 and is the only one I've read; the other two will be published on subsequent Mondays (July 18 and 25.)

This being a Zimmer piece, it of course has strengths, and I'll get to them in a moment. But first, complaints, some of which have nothing to do with him.

This one does, though. The piece's opening was dismaying, an account of how a a top Yale geneticist, Mark Gerstein, pointed to Zimmer and told colleagues that the flesh-and-blood man sitting with them was not Zimmer at all. "'Really,' Gerstein said, pointing to a slim hard drive on the table, 'this is Carl Zimmer.' By 'this,' he meant the sequence of my genome, which was being transferred from the drive onto a MacBook."

To say that Zimmer was in the hard drive is just, well, silly. It's a declaration that we are our genomes and our genomes are us. That's scientifically dead wrong, as Gerstein and Zimmer know perfectly well. (Not to mention that it's an appalling step back into 20th century genetic determinism, with its sordid history of the American Eugenics Movement, forced sterilizations, and of course the ultimate stain on genetics research, the Nazis with their extermination of Jews and others they deemed unfit–gays, the handicapped, gypsies–and their Aryan baby-breeding programs.)

The genome on a hard drive is a snapshot in time. In the real world, genomes change, with genes turning off and on and sometimes mutating to do something else entirely–or nothing at all. Furthermore, to declare that a person is in a computer just because a copy of his digital genome is there makes as much sense as saying "you are what you eat." Sure, food and drink trigger cellular and genetic responses. They do that directly–but also indirectly by altering your billions of resident microbes, which produce molecules that act on your genes. To say that your genome is you or you are what you eat are both true as far as they go, but neither goes all the way to explaining you.

This is a fine example of the Curse of the Anecdotal Lede. The writer selects the striking verbal image–a human presence in a hard drive! shades of the Matrix!–even though the image seriously misrepresents the science he's trying to explain.

My other complaint about the writing can also be laid at Zimmer's door, although it wouldn't be right to call it his fault exactly. Overall, his genes advise, Zimmer is remarkably healthy. On the evidence of the first part of this piece, anyway, no dark forebodings lurk in his genome.

That's great news for him and his family, but not so great for Zimmer-as-writer. There is an absence of material for plucking at heart-strings. No potential cliff-hangers. He tries to wring drama out of a close-up investigation of his version of the gene that causes the devastation of Huntington's disease. But he has no family history of this dominant disorder, so there's hardly any chance the gene will indicate disaster ahead. And indeed it does not.

My final rant has nothing to do with Zimmer's writing. It's about what I guess you could call, to adopt a term from the movies, the production design. Digital publications are experimenting with presentation, especially presentation of their big pieces like this series. There's not much to like about the choices STAT made here.

They're calling the series Carl Zimmer's Game of Genomes and show his caricature sitting on something that looks a bit like the Iron Throne, but made of double helices. There is nothing about the Zimmer genome or his writing that bears any resemblance to everybody's favorite TV epic of bloody politics and endless war.  "Game of Genomes" is a baffling choice for a title. It strikes  me as a random, even arbitrary, grab for eyeballs.

Also baffling, not to mention annoying, are the graphics sprinkled throughout the piece. The illustrations seem to be based on brief metaphors in the text– scuba diving, dog shows–but they bounce and jiggle and in some cases swim through the text, contributing nothing but distraction. Not a good idea for a piece that's trying to illuminate fairly complex technical matters. Explanatory graphics would have been a much better choice, but I suppose that approach was rejected as being too conventional.

My rant is not to say that this unprecedented deep dive–the deepest possible at this moment in genomic technology– into a top science journalist's genome isn't one of the more ambitious attempts at explanatory genomics ever. Game of Genomes makes it quite clear that doing genomics at this level of detail is the epitome of complex and demanding.

I can't wait to read the next two parts. I'm jealous. Of course I'm jealous.

Source: SciLogs goes kaput, Game of Genomes is an ambitious science writing oddity