2002 Science in Society Journalism Awards

Newspaper

Rick Weiss

“Building a New Child: Embryo Screening Creates a Tool Against Disease—and Ethical Questions”

The Washington Post

Description

In the newspaper category, Rick Weiss of the The Washington Post took top honors for “Building a New Child: Embryo Screening Creates a Tool Against Disease-and Ethical Questions” (June 30, 2001), in which he brought a combination of excellent enterprise reporting, fine writing, and great ideas to his story and his coverage of this issue.

At a time when so many reporters are writing either explanatory “gee-whiz” or political stories about hi-tech, baby-making procedures, Weiss stood out in his ongoing critical examination of the important and unresolvable ethical dilemmas created by these techniques.

Biography

Rick Weiss is a science and medical reporter for the The Washington Post. He came to the Post’s Health section in 1993 and moved to the national desk in January 1996, where he covers genetics, molecular biology and other topicsin the life sciences.

Before coming to the Post, Weiss was a staff writer for Health magazine in San Francisco. Before that he was for four years a biology and biomedicine writer at Science News magazine, a Washington, D.C.-based weekly. He also spent a year as a science writer for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Weiss earned a B.S. in biology from Cornell University in 1974. For ten years he worked as a licensed medical technologist in hospital laboratories, specializing in microbiology, serology and blood banking. In 1983 he entered the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Masters in Journalism in 1985. He has written articles for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Science, Discover and other publications.

Weiss lives in Takoma Park, Md., with his wife, New York Times science writer Natalie Angier, and their daughter, Katherine.

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