It's a delicate issue in more ways than one, Tabitha M. Powledge writes, citing a Nature commentary. How should regulators deal with the odd-sounding but apparently very effective practice of transplanting fecal material from healthy patients to sick ones? "The researchers propose that FDA look upon the feces used in transplants not as a new drug but rather as a tissue product. Or perhaps FDA should even devise a new classification, as the agency has done for blood."
Science writing news
Nine talented juniors and seniors from the East Coast to the West Coast and as far north as Montreal, gathered in Chicago Feb. 13-17 to report on the 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. These travel fellows were selected by the NASW Education Committee from a competitive set of applicants. The NASW Travel Fellows’ dispatches from The Windy City have been posted here.
The Winthrop Rockefeller Institute invites members of the National Association of Science Writers to apply for a scholarship to attend the 5th Nanotechnology for Health Care Conference at its conference center on Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas. Read on for application details or visit www.arkansasnanohealth.com/nasw-scholarship.
Minda Zetlin, president of the American Society of Journalists & Authors, writes that freelancers should think twice before criticizing their peers who work for below-market rates: "When I hear a writer proudly declare that he or she never accepts less than X — and neither should anyone else — all I can think is how cruel that is, and how wrong. How dare we criticize a colleague who may be trying to feed a child, or make a mortgage payment, or pay for health care?"
Did you see the story about women finding Tour de France leaders better looking than the also-rans? Or the one saying that gossip enhances group cooperation? Paul Raeburn did, and he calls out the Post for what the British call churnalism: "These stories showed up in one of the nation's leading newspapers — and in the science section, no less, where we can assume they were carefully reported. Alas, that would be an unwarranted assumption."
"A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf — at any rate it is safer from criticism," Herman Melville wrote to a friend in a letter contained in a 1954 book excerpted by Maria Popova. The letter, written less than a year before publication of Moby-Dick, shows Melville immersed in the nautical world even at home on his Berkshires farm: "I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic."
Daytime highs are in the 60s at the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, a fact noted by Tabitha M. Powledge in her science blogs roundup. She quotes Dana Hunter as saying Sochi's weather is like Seattle's, and ponders its future climate: "One of the reasons Russian President Vladimir Putin lobbied so hard to get the Olympics for Sochi was to turn the nearby Caucasus mountains into a trendy spot for a winter sports resort. Putin must be one of those global-warming deniers."
Why do writers procrastinate? Writing in the Atlantic, Megan McArdle theorizes that it's because they were very smart when they were children: "If you've spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good."
Following up on an earlier post, Bill O’Sullivan offers five tips for editors on how to work with writers. (The previous post advised writers on working with editors.) His number one tip? Don't be shy about changing a writer's copy without asking permission: "If you know how to fix the problem, just fix it. Think a sentence would be better without half the words? Cut them. If the writer doesn't like what you've done, he or she will say so."