I make no secret of the fact that I am President of the Carl Zimmer fan club. Carl’s writing was a big influence for me well before we became colleagues at Discover. So when Alok Jha at the Guardian asked me to write a piece analysing a great piece of science writing, I didn’t have to search very hard. You can find that piece in the Guardian today. Consider it a (short and incomplete) guide to good science writing, and an ode to a peerless chum.

It begins like this:

Scientific papers aren’t known for their catchy titles. Here’s a typical example: “Ancestral capture of syncytin-Car1, a fusogenic endogenous retroviral envelope gene involved in placentation and conserved in Carnivora.”

A good science writer