Introducing Germination: Diseases, Drugs, Farms, and Food

When I was a kid, my favorite part of school wasn’t class — even though I loved studying, and liked showing off what I knew. It wasn’t the uniforms, though my boarding school’s dresses and blazers, and shoes for indoor and outdoor games, were a puzzle that came together differently every time. And it certainly wasn’t the food: School dinner in England was a mystery of boiled sprouts and stewed rhubarb, even if the Texas high school lunches that came after taught me how to make Frito pie.

What I loved most about school, with a fierceness that bordered on devotion, were school supplies. The incense of a just-sharpened pencil. The order in a fresh box of pen cartridges. And more than anything, the promise in a new notebook, and the anticipation of filling its empty, perfect pages with everything I would discover and learn.

I’m feeling a similar thrill now, viewing this new space at Phenomena. Welcome to Germination, a blog that will explore public health, global health, and food production and policy—and ancient diseases, emerging infections, antibiotic resistance, agricultural planning, foodborne illness, and how we’ll feed and care for an increasingly crowded world.

If you followed me here from my previous blog Superbug at Wired, thanks, and get comfortable. If I’m a new discovery for you, here’s a capsule bio. I’m a freelance journalist working mostly for magazines (Wired,  Scientific American, Nature, Slate, the Atlantic, the Guardian and Modern Farmer, along with an array of women’s magazines). I’ve written two books so far—Superbug, about the global rise of antibiotic resistance, and Beating Back the Devil, about the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the disease-detective corps of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and am working on a third, about how we came to use antibiotics in agriculture, and what a mistake that turned out to be.

Before I was a magazine writer, I was a newspaper reporter, doing mostly investigative work: on the causes of cancer clusters, the social effects of drug trafficking, and a mysterious illness in reservists that turned out to be the first cases of Gulf War Syndrome. In my last newspaper job, I covered the CDC, under orders from the editor who hired me to “get in there and tell us these people’s stories.” I spent a lot of time talking my way into investigations and onto planes in the middle of the night. It was enormous fun.

I’m also a Senior Fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, and just finished a fellowship at MIT. I do some video. And I just gave a TED talk, on imagining what the world will be like after we’ve used up antibiotics. (The video has not gone up yet, but I’ll let you know when it does.)

As a journalist, my interest is complexity, inadvertence, and unintended consequences. (My Phenomena colleague Ed Yong jokes that he covers the “Wow” beat; I think of what I do as the “Oops” beat.) We got to widespread resistance because we wanted to cure infections quickly; we got to factory farming because we wanted to ensure affordable food. There isn’t (much) malfeasance in either of those endeavors,  but there is a ton of good intentions—and good intentions gone bad are a rich, rewarding subject. We might be here a while.

Here’s what you can expect at Germination: reports on new scientific findings; inquiries into policy initiatives; profiles and interviews with researchers doing cool things; history; and, occasionally, whimsy. I have been writing for a year for National Geographic‘s food platform The Plate, and some posts that deal more purely with food will be loaned or cross-posted there. (About which: You make Frito pie by opening a serving-size bag of Fritos along the back seam and plopping in a ladle of chili and some shredded yellow cheese. It tastes best when served by a lunch lady in a hairnet and a Texas Longhorns jersey.) If you’d like to hear more about my plans, head over to The Loom, where my new colleague Carl Zimmer has kindly conducted a Q&A with me.

When I think back to being a kid at the start of a school year, the initial thrill might have been those pristine new notebooks—but the bigger thrill was filling them. Phenomena is the most exclusive science-writing club on the internet, and I’m excited to join it. Please come along.

(Much gratitude to Jonathan Eisen, PhD, for suggesting Germination as a blog name.)