Today, Phenomena gains a phenomenal new member: Maryn McKenna. If you’ve read her books such as Superbug or kept up with her blog of the same name, you know that nobody does a better job of analyzing the threats we face from infectious diseases. To celebrate the launch of “Germination,” her blog here at Phenomena, I asked Maryn some questions about how she got here, and where she’s headed.

A complicated one–the kind that makes sense in retrospect but seemed random at the time. I started as a newspaper reporter, with a just-out-of-grad-school specialty of conducting investigations by digging through documents. The first investigation I did, though, was not science but finance, about bad savings and loan organizations in the