(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) - When we think of science we often think of facts, data, and analysis.

It can seem impersonal and cold.

But today's guest brings to his science reporting the human capacity for empathy.

He's science journalist Mark Johnson, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with The Providence Journal.

This week we're joined by Mark Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, formally of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

He now practices his craft at the Washington Post.

He joins us today from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Mark, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you so much for having me, Jim and Wayne.

Really appreciate it.

It's an honor.

- Well, congratulations on all of your success.

You know, you've mentioned to us before that you were a bad high school science student and so I'm curious about how does a bad high school science student become one of the country's best science journalists?

- I think I got better about pursuing my curiosity.

I was always curious, but I was kind of a lazy student in high school, and I think I stumbled over a lot of the terminology that goes with science.

I had this idea that somehow we should be able to understand things without having to look up words.

And once I started to look up words, I think I got better at sort of understanding science.

I also think that it began to really appeal to me that there was so much in science that I didn't know, and that since I was not very good at it, I kind of had a license to ask a lot of questions about it.

And I think it also helped that the expectations were very low or at least my own were.

- (chuckles) Does that curiosity affect the stories you cover or just way you cover those stories?

- Both.

I think that it affects the stories that I choose because I have very, very basic questions that come up.

One of the first science stories I ever worked on was actually in Providence at the Providence Journal.

We had a blue whale that was pulled ashore in Massachusetts and I was sent to cover it at the point at which it had already been at the New Bedford Landfill for about 10 days.

And scientists from up and down the east coast had flocked to this event to get parts of the whale.

And I was there because they were sort of stripping off all the parts but they were also getting the skeleton ready to go to the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

And aside from the horrendous smell, what really sort of captured my interest was what all of these scientists hoped to learn from this one dead blue whale.

I mean, one person was getting the eyeballs and another woman at Tufts was getting the eardrums, a woman at Cedar Sinai was getting the larynx which is like, I think, about eight-and-a-half feet long.

(Jim groans) And at that point, like, I mean, it really was ripe.

It smelled terrible.

But I wondered what it was that they wanted to learn.

And when I approached editors, they kind of thought it was something that readers would be interested in too.

So it was this wonderful opportunity to sort of pursue, you know, my curiosity.

- So Mark, you talk about being at the Providence Journal, and of course, as you know, we both worked there together.

You came as a young reporter having been in a couple of other newspapers.

I was immediately impressed with your work, but you you came as a general assignment reporter, and for the most part you were a general assignment reporter during your time at The Journal.

And so here's the question: is general assignment reporting important background for people who go on to specialize in particular areas?

You've done it with science I've done it with mental health and, you know, a long list of people who've gone on to specialize.

Talk about the importance of general assignment, general reporting, and general journalism, whether on the job or at a journalism school.

- I think it's very important.

You get awfully used to being put in difficult situations where you have to learn a lot very quickly.

When I first got to Milwaukee, I was sent to cover 9/11.

I had to drive with another reporter from Milwaukee to New York, and I had to sort of figure out where the stories were, what would be of interest to Wisconsin readers as opposed to, you know, everyone else.

And actually in that case pretty much the whole country, I think, was interested in some of the same things.

In other cases, I think you're required to get at least a working expertise in something very, very quickly and you learn to respond to kind of desperate situations.

Again, when I was in Providence, one of the most nerve-wracking situations I ever had was I'd been sent to Harvard to cover the wrestler-turned-governor Jesse Ventura giving a speech there.

And Harvard assured me that there was a place for me to plug in my laptop.

Well, after Ventura's speech, they corrected themselves and said, "Oh, there actually isn't."

They said, "Oh, you know, if you just go to this Copy Cops a block away, they'll let you do it for sure."

And when I got to the Copy Cops, they said, "Oh, no we stopped doing that about six months ago."

So I was about an hour away from deadline.

And this is the absolute truth.

I was in Harvard Square I was going up to strangers asking them if I could get into their apartments to plug in my laptop.

I got so desperate.

Eventually, I went into a hotel and asked the hotel bartender and by that point I had sweat streaming down my face.

And I think when you get through those situations it gives you a certain confidence that you can figure your way out of things.

And that includes finding ways to answer the things that you don't know.

That's very important in covering a specialized field, whether it's science or business or law.

There's a lot of terminology and if you didn't take those classes in college, you have to sort of figure it out, in large part, on your own.

The advantage of it is that I think that it does help when it comes to sort of explaining to ordinary readers the complexities of something like DNA sequencing or stem cells.

I always figure when I go and talk to scientists that if they can explain something to me so that I can understand it, I'm in really great shape as far as explaining to someone else.

I mean, because if they've gotten through to me, then it's definitely possible, you know?

- Well, clearly that's one of the keys to your success as a science and health writer.

So you were at Milwaukee for many years.

You won many awards, you wrote two books while you were there, science obviously was your bread and butter as it were.

Why is there today, still, so much distrust of science and scientist?

You call it anti-science sentiment and we certainly have seen this during the pandemic and before the pandemic.

Why does that persist?

- That's an excellent question.

I mean, I think about it a lot, and at the very core I think it's a problem of, people, very basically, mistrust what they don't understand.

I mean, I think that's in some ways why I wasn't drawn to science as a student.

There were too many things I didn't understand and it didn't have its own sort of logic to it.

And I think that science has become more and more complicated.

And unfortunately scientists have not gotten a lot better at explaining what they do.

I'm sure you've come across this with mental health papers.

You have to read a journal article and reading a five-page article in a scientific or medical journal is like reading 30 pages of "War and Peace."

It's just, it's brutal.

I mean, actually, I'd take the 30 pages of "War and Peace" any day.

(hosts laughing) You have to, you really have to go through it line by line and you have to look up, even having covered stem cells for 10 years, I still come across terms that I don't know and I have to look up.

And very often sometimes you run into a term that you look up, and in the definition there's three other words you don't know.

So I think that that's a barrier between the public and scientists.

I think that members of the public tend to feel that scientists, because they don't seem to make a huge effort to explain their work to other people, that they're kind of elitist.

And I think there's a little bit of a mistrust there, which is really a shame.

I mean, when you think about it, at the end of World War II the scientists were really the country's heroes.

I mean, for better or for worse the invention of the atomic bomb made physicists you know, household names.

I mean, there was a great deal of respect and awe that sort of went with the field.

And I think some of the scientists at the time were better at explaining things than some of the scientists today.

When Einstein famously wrote a book on relativity because he felt bus drivers, you know, waitresses, waiters, people who pick up the garbage, he felt ordinary people should understand the science because it was important, it was gonna affect them.

- It seems like there' a cultural difference too, that it's not just the effectiveness of scientists to communicate, but even the receptivity of the audience and just sort of a lack of a counter-intellectualism that permeates so much of society.

We've talked about this before, but you know, my father gave me his copy of Karl Marx's "Kapital" and I remember on the dust cover of it it has, "An essential collection for every thinking person's library."

I can't imagine a book being published like that today with that same dust cover blurb.

It's just that that's just almost incongruous in today's culture.

And that has to manifest itself in the audience for science journalism I would think.

- I think so too.

Just as a quick aside, we're moving and we've been having house showings, and one of the first things that our real estate agent objected to about the way our house did look was that we had too many books in the bookshelves.

- Wow.

- Wow.

- And he taught us how to reduce 30 books on a shelf to like three.

And I think there's something interesting in that that a bookshelf is more pleasing when it's close to empty.

I think that in some ways television has has done some of this to us, the internet.

I mean, we're used to understanding things quickly.

And I think that we're also very reluctant to do the hard work of thinking.

And I kind of, I can really sympathize because there are times when I interview scientists and I feel like my tiny brain is peddling as fast as it possibly can just to stay two steps behind.

I mean, it's a bit of a scary feeling.

And I think that for some reason in this country, I think we have not valued doing that kind of thinking and sort of you making that effort.

One thing I remember learning from the chemist who was teaching at UW and now teaches at MIT, she said that she went to a conference when she was a grad student with a professor of hers from, I think it was USC.

They get off the plane in Japan and he was a Nobel Prize winner but he would be completely unknown to most American audiences.

In Japan people were getting together with him for, you know, they wanted to shoot pictures with him.

They wanted his autograph.

I mean, I think it's undeniable that scientists in this country are not celebrities the way that, you know, sports stars or movie stars or singers are, which is a shame.

- So, Mark, you mentioned books and bookshelves and yesterday, as a matter of fact, with news of the passing of Peter Straub who is one of the great horror writers, I happened to look at my bookshelves, one of my bookshelves and I was looking for "The Talisman," which Straub wrote, co-wrote with Stephen King, and there next to it, and this was not an accident, this is just where I happened to put your book, your most recent book, "Though the Earth Gives Way" which is an incredible read, and it's really about climate change and what could happen if climate change is not stopped, reversed, not reversed, but isn't ameliorated in some way.

Can you give people in our audience who may not have read this book an overview of what it is?

And the second question is, why would you write a novel of fictional work about climate change?

- Okay, first off, I'll tell you what it is.

It's, when I was in a high school, I was taught an English literature book called "The Decameron" by Boccaccio.

It's one of the first novels ever written.

And it's basically a story of how noblemen and noblewomen flee into the hills outside of Florence during the Great Plague and to pass the time they tell each other stories.

And one day when I was taking a walk with my wife after work, it came to me that I really liked the idea of telling stories as a way to get us through hard times.

And it just came to me, what if we put that idea onto, instead of the great plague, the disaster that everyone is escaping is a climate apocalypse, something that's very difficult to imagine and something where we might be left with very little else besides storytelling, you know, as far as social skills.

The, what was the second question?

(chuckles) I'm sorry.

- No, just give an overview of the book.

I mean the characters and where it is set.

And, you know, again, it's a dystopian novel, post-apocalyptic climate, the worst outcome of climate change has actually happened.

- Right.

- The overview.

- So in this story, nine strangers meet at a retreat, abandoned retreat center in Michigan, and they've lost a lot of their faith in other people.

I mean, one of the things that I sort of imagined would happen is that if the worst happens in climate change and some of the terrible things that we've talked about do come to pass, the polarization that we've experienced over political things, sometimes over things like, you know, healthcare or over, you know, who won a presidential race, those are big things, but they would be immediately much, much smaller set against a decision which had ramifications for the future of the world.

I mean, if one side of the aisle were to look across at the other side and say, "You know, you basically doomed our planet My children are going to grow up in a world much, much worse because you didn't listen to scientists."

I think that that, it really fascinated me what that could do to human relationships in the country.

I thought the fracture would be terrible and I still sort of feel that way.

- So fiction gave you a certain degree of liberty, I guess it were, in getting that story out.

Again, it's a very compelling, you know, I started reading it and just was swept right through it but it gives you an opportunity to do things you can't with a straight-forward science non-fiction article or non-fiction book.

Just talk very briefly about that.

Highlight, you know, the freedom it gave you.

- For me, the sort of existential dread that my generation experienced growing up was the threat of nuclear war.

And I'm not sure whether it was like this for other people, but I took it really seriously.

I had nightmares at night that were post-apocalyptic dreams.

They were just absolutely horrendous.

And I remember I was interested in the subject, I used to read a lot of newspaper articles about nuclear weapons, but what engaged me most, I think, was a book called "On the Beach," which was written in the 1950s by the Australian writer Neville Shute.

And it created a sensation when it was written and yet it does not have a lot of the things we think of as required parts of a nuclear apocalyptic story.

We don't see a lot of the fighting and war or the gamesmanship that leads up to it.

It's basically the story of a group of Australians in Melbourne who are among the last living people on Earth and their days are numbered.

They're basically waiting for this cloud of radiation that has swept through the world to reach their part of the world.

And they know there's nothing they can do when it does happen, and it takes place over a course of a few months.

And there was something in the melancholy and in the...

I was really drawn into the characters and this sense of doom and all the things that you haven't gotten to experience in life.

I mean, one of the main characters is a new mother who's just had a baby and her sort of defining characteristic is denial.

She can't see that the future is going to end for her and for her baby.

I think that the author sort of really picked some of the psychic touchstones that people were experiencing about the threat of nuclear weapons.

And so the whole reason that I chose fiction instead of non-fiction was I felt that, first of all, there were excellent nonfiction books already out on climate change, but also I felt that fiction offered the opportunity to kind of look into the abyss, to look at the things that we don't know for sure how a terrible story like that would end.

But fiction gives you the license to imagine it.

And I think that that's an important part of the process.

I mean, if you look at it, I think that movies like "Dr. Strangelove" and like "The Day After" had a tremendous impact on the public beyond, you know, some of the policy debates and questions that we felt and even the duck-and-cover exercises that traumatized, you know, a lot of school children.

I think those fictional treatments really brought home what a terrible, terrible cloud hung over us.

- You know, Mark, let's turn a little bit to some of your more recent reporting on the pandemic, on viruses and threats to health in general.

You know, does the experience of the last couple of years sort of fit in your mind in that long tradition of sort of almost Cassandra's warning about what's going to come next but being dismissed and often ignored?

And what does that tell us about whether we should be preparing for the next pandemic?

- I think it's, unfortunately, it feels all too real as far as the situation you're referring to.

I mean, it's a classic defining trait of of humans that we don't like to look ahead to something that may happen that may be an obstacle or a huge problem in the future.

We really don't tend to do that kind of work until the crisis is on us.

And I mean, one of the first things that I looked at in covering COVID-19 was efforts that had been made back in 2003 in response to SARS.

There was a team of scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine that had actually worked on a vaccine for SARS which probably would've been fairly effective with SARS-CoV-2.

And the irony was that the military, U.S. Military, paid for their research until the point where they needed to do clinical trials.

By that point, SARS had vanished.

And I think that instead of seeing how lucky we were and what a threat this could be out there, I think, really, the world on the whole, and I'm no exception, we all sort of breathed the sigh of relief, you know, "Wow, thank God that didn't get us," and all the funding for that vaccine went away, the government, nobody.

And so the irony of it, one of the the stories I wrote early on was how this vaccine which had never actually gone through clinical trials had been sitting for more than a decade in freezers in Houston, just because we didn't have any follow through.

- It's a remarkable story.

Mark, you're at the Washington Post now.

We'll look forward to your reporting there.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

- He's Mark Johnson.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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