Writer Veronique Greenwood talked for the SYSU Center for English-language Creative Writing

Source: School of Foreign Languages
Written by: Nazli İnal
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On November 20, 2015, the second Book Club event of the semester was held in the Lecture Hall 101 of the School of Foreign Languages. Writer and essayist Veronique Greenwood spoke about science writing in her lecture titled “Writing from the Edge of the Known World.” Greenwood’s lecture was organized by the Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing, but it did not fail to attract listeners from a variety of other departments. 
 

Greenwood started with recounting the influence of Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” from the author’s 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem that she read for the first time when she was seventeen years old. The essay on Lucille Miller and her crime was (is) utterly gripping, and Didion’s near obsession with the murder and how San Bernardino County as a place almost invited it, made it look normal if not natural, contagious, but just as importantly, reading it, Greenwood discovered that being fascinated and curious and writing about one’s obsessions could be a job, and knew at that moment she wanted to do exactly that.

Even if Greenwood had not shared this formative anecdote, her audience would still, and early on in her talk, realize that she is a writer inspired and driven by endless curiosity, that life does not cease to fascinate her, and that no matter what she is writing about, cells or quantum physics or her great-great-aunt, she approaches her subject at once with fondness and respect. Not only did all of her stories and her discussion of the genre, but also her perfunctory comments reenacted these very values that govern her work. Even when she was talking about something that is common knowledge, such as the body being made up of cells, “trillions of gorgeous little things,” Greenwood’s genuine excitement was visible in her face.

Greenwood’s approach to science writing can be said to have two salient characteristics, which predictably inform and determine one another. In her lecture, she emphasized that she wanted to produce interesting, rigorous, and accurate science writing. Critical of writers who choose to inflate and embellish the reality, Greenwood commented, “Reality is interesting enough as it is, you do not need to hype it up,” and added that she followed the ethical code that has been established by the National Association of Science Writers, an association founded in the mid-1930s in New York. Committed to reporting reality, Greenwood said that science writing should serve to the rather romanticized accounts about the scientists who have, sometimes unintentionally, arrived at results that were universally useful, and that the society should rethink its scientist-hero who died for humanity template in order to acknowledge and credit all the scientists who have put in hard and honest work in their research. Greenwood emphasized that, “The sole point of science is that you don’t know what you are going to find,” and added that the scientists we know by name are simply the minority. 

Greenwood’s first hand knowledge of a scientist whose work did not turn out as she wished comes from the story of her great-great-aunt, Marguerite Perey, who was Marie Curie’s personal technician in the Radium Institute of Paris. After Curie’s death, Perey stayed at the institute, and a few years later discovered an element that she named Francium. She had hoped Francium could be used to cure cancer, with which she herself was infected, but with an element that decayed as fast as Francium, that has a half-life of only twenty-two minutes, it soon became clear that this was not the case. Perey’s discovery was not going to matter much, it was not going to make a difference where she had hoped it would. The question is, how do we talk about scientists like Perey, whose discoveries are much less famous, much less fashionable, and whose names are fast forgotten, but who have nonetheless died for science.

Should people want to read more science writing and do not know where to start, Greenwood recommended some books that she considered to be excellent examples of the genre. Among the books she reviewed were The Poisoner's Handbook (2010) by Deborah Blum; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Book (2010) by Rebecca Skloot who spent ten years with the Lacks family before writing the book;The Soul of a New Machine (1981) by Tracy Kidder, about a team of computer engineers designing the next-generation computer; and the classic, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Book (1985) by the late Oliver Sacks.

Veronique Greenwood holds a degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from Yale University. Her work has been published, among others, in The New York Times Magazine, Pacific Standard, Aeon, Popular Science, Scientific American, and DISCOVER, where she was a staff writer.