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| Volume 46, Number 1, Spring/Summer 1998 |
Help Has Arrived!
ScienceWriters, in its present format since 1984, owes its existence to a number of friends. When a generous gift from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing made it possible for me to serve as its first-time paid editor, I agreed on the condition that Barbara Culliton serve as de facto editor until I had earned the title. When she knighted me a year or so later, I asked her to serve as chairman of a shadow advisory committee, which she has most agreeably done ever since.
Copy editing and production in those years was done by Nancy Metzger, a friend of mine and both friend and wife of Norman Metzger, now deputy executive officer of the National Research Council in Washington and longtime NASW member.
After several years of clipping and pasting galley proofs, Nancy moved to more challenging tasks, and I turned for help to my niece, Laura Lewis, a desktop publisher in Seattle. Laura yanked SW into the Modern Era by returning page proofs a day or so after receiving my diskette. She also introduced montages, wraparounds and other computer marvels, including (with the inestimable help of Earle Holland) a searchable archive on the NASW website. And she, like Nancy, periodically saved the editor from embarrassing oversights - and now has moved on.
Interestingly, the timesaving aspects of computer publishing, it turns out, are more than wiped out by the time-demanding aspects of the World Wide Web. Skimming three newspapers and perhaps a half-dozen magazines a day used to take a programmable amount of time. Performing a text search of several dozen periodicals on the web is quite another matter. And keeping track of members' observations on the NASW listserve can -- in times of crisis -- wipe out huge chunks of time. Thus, when Richard Harris, perhaps noting the unseasonable arrival of issues, offered to provide editorial assistance, the offer was accepted. Happily, assistance has arrived from a familiar quarter. Lynne Friedmann, a frequent contributor to SW, is now SW managing editor. She is working with a new desktop publisher in California and will be responsible for much of SW's editorial content. News of awards, promotions, career moves, activities of regional groups and the like should go directly to her at P.O. Box 1725, Solana Beach, California 92075 or lfriedmann@nasw.org; tel -- 619-793-3537; fax -- 619-793-1144.
And Now -- A Bit of Background
When Gina Kolata's front-page report in The New York Times on the work of Judah Folkman attracted enormous attention on nasw-talk, Richard Harris recalled that she had been of earlier interest to ScienceWriters. He suggested that an account of her previous connections be spelled out for the members of nasw-talk. Since she is also the subject of the lead article in this issue of SW, our response to Harris is reprinted below:
Gina has had a lot of ink in SW. During the period when she worked on Science, she was an active contributor to and supporter of ScienceWriters. Her book review of Bridges to Infinity appeared in the November 1984 issue, an open memorandum to Stephen Jay Gould in December 1985; and an article on public-information policy in HHS was in the March 1986 issue. Then Gina began to work on The New York Times and began to make news on her own. An AIDS advocacy group publicly excoriated her for an article on the disease, which Victor McElheny covered for ScienceWriters in its Summer 1990 issue. Finally, I wrote a kind of flippant report on the dogged efforts of a Princeton professor to get the Times to admit that Kolata had made five serious errors in an article she had written on the "Traveling Salesman Problem," which has (had?) fascinated mathematicians for years. I guess that was the last straw for her and she left NASW.
The open memorandum to Gould, incidentally, defended two New York Times editorials on mass extinctions, to which Gould had objected on the basis that the matter was much too complex to be written about in a newspaper editorial. It was timely then, and is even more timely now, with Gould coming in as president of AAAS.