Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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Science online and Science Online: A (Possible) Way Forward

October 19, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image: Doctorow (CC), Flickr

I mean this post to address the convulsions in the science-writing community that arose this past week in the wake of the problems faced by writer Danielle N. Lee, PhD regarding her Scientific American blog. That situation was resolved to good effect and quickly; if you’d like to catch up on that, the posts are here and here.

(Constant Readers, bear with me. I’ll get back to scary diseases and food policy next week.)

As most in that professional community know, but other readers and members of my other networks may not, Lee’s experience inadvertently triggered a cascade of revelations in which Bora Zivkovic, the blogs editor at SciAm and a very powerful and outspoken gatekeeper in science writing, was accused of sexual harassment by an aspiring writer. (Not Lee.) Over several days, additional accusations with and without names attached tumbled around the blogosphere and Twitterverse until, on Friday, one of his bloggers — the third woman to come forward by name — published a searing account of her experience which included quotes from sexually explicit emails he had written. Within hours, he resigned from his SciAm post. (The best wrap-up is Laura Helmuth’s at Slate.)

As a SciAm columnist and contributing editor, I am grateful that Zivkovic has been separated from the magazine and institution. But I think it is important to emphasize how wide the impact of his bad behavior has been. So I want to address the continuing ripples in the community, especially surrounding the forthcoming beloved and very hot-ticket conference, Science Online, which he helped create.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: personal, SciAm, Science Blogs

Follow-up: On Clarity, Dignity, Apologies and Moving Forward

October 15, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image: Snigl3t (CC), Flickr

This is a follow-up to my post over the weekend on the #StandingwithDNLee situation that enveloped Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D., her blog at Scientific American, SciAm’s partner organizations, and — by extension — the many thousands of people who expressed support for her. While the situation is sure to have a long tail, some significant things happened Sunday and Monday, so I want to update and note those to close the loop. (If this story is new to you, have a look at my last post.)

In chronological order:

  • Scientific American posted an explanation (though not, publicly, an apology), alleging that legal concerns caused Dr. Lee’s post  — exploring her reaction to verbal abuse by an editor at an organization which SciAm listed as a partner — to be taken down within an hour of its being published.
  • Biology-Online.org, whose blog editor verbally abused Dr. Lee in the process of asking her to work for free, announced that that editor had been fired, and unreservedly apologized to Dr. Lee.
  • Dr. Lee’s post at Scientific American was restored with an editor’s note.

If that’s what you needed to catch up, that’s the news in a nutshell. Out of many, many blog reactions (some curated here by Liz Ditz; 13,600 indexed by Google), I recommend these posts by Kate Clancy, Dr. Isis, Janet Stemwedel, Melanie Tannenbaum and Daniel Lende. If on the other hand you think all this coverage was more than the situation warranted, you might prefer Scott Huler’s post.

That’s the quick round-up. More details and some final thoughts to follow. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: personal, SciAm, Science Blogs

On Science, Communication, Respect, and Coming Back from Mistakes

October 12, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

image: Marc Falardeau, (CC), Flickr

A couple of unpleasant and deeply dismaying things have happened in the science blogosphere in the past 36 hours or so. I’m posting on it, along with a growing number of other science bloggers, in order to stand in solidarity with a fellow blogger and to ensure her voice is not silenced. (If you’d like to catch up to the full story, try the Twitter hashtag #standingwithdnlee, or read this search string here. It will take a while.)

Disclosure up front: This situation involves the blog network of the magazine Scientific American, where I am a columnist and contributing editor (which is magazine jargon indicating, more or less, that they pay me a set amount of money for a certain number of columns per year). I respect the Scientific American name and feel as privileged to be associated it as I do to be here at Wired — but in this case I think the magazine has made a mistake, and I hope they reverse course.

That said, here’s what’s going on.

(This post has been updated — read to the end — and a follow-up appears here.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: personal, SciAm, Science Blogs

Fecal Transplants: The FDA Steps In

May 19, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Hi constant readers: I am traveling again, and while I’m in a far time zone, news has broken that you might be interested in. So while I don’t have a full understanding myself yet of what’s going on, I’m going to throw up what I’ve got, because I know how many people are interested in this.

Briefly: The US Food and Drug Administration has decided to bring the semi-outlawed — but very safe and very effective — procedure called “fecal transplant” under its auspices, ruling that to perform it, physicians must have applied for an “investigational new drug application,” or IND. This requires a lot of advance paperwork, 30 days of consideration, and does not return not a guaranteed yes. For the transplants, which have been performed informally but carefully by a growing number of physicians as a treatment (and often cure) for devastating C. difficile infection, it may improve safety, but it can’t help but impose obstacles and delay. (My past posts on fecal transplants here and here.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: C.diff, FDA, microbiome, SciAm, Science Blogs

Looking Inside the Dead: The Rise of the Virtual Autopsy

October 31, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment


We’ve all been so justifiably preoccupied with former Hurricane Sandy that you may have missed a story unfolding in England this past week. So, as a distraction from the trees, traffic and sludge:

Ronald Brown, an English veteran of World War II, would quietly complain from time to time about his bad leg, the reminder of a land mine that he stepped on in August 1944 in France. Army surgeons felt it was safer to leave the mine’s fragments in his flesh than to try and fish them out, and ever after, Brown’s knee set off airport scanners and ached too much for his grandchildren to sit on it.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: imaging, MRI, SciAm, Science Blogs, world war II

The 'NIH Superbug': A New Case, And An Overlooked Resource

September 17, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

News, via the Washington Post‘s hard-working health reporter Brian Vastag: After 6 months with no cases, carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella has surfaced again at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, and has killed a boy from Minnesota who came to the specialty hospital after a bone-marrow transplant meant to address an immune deficiency. This sad event makes the boy the 19th patient to contract the extremely resistant hospital organism, and the 12th to die from it, since the outbreak began.

You can find here my last post analyzing this outbreak (which was originally reported by the Post following a write-up by NIH staff in the journal Science Translational Medicine). I’m looping back to the subject not just because of this new death, but also to add a few new publications to the discussion, one of them mine.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, carbapenems, CRKP, Klebsiella, KPC, NIH, Resistance, SciAm, Science Blogs

Superbug Summer Books:The Fate Of The Species

September 17, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment


I confess: It can get lonely sometimes, being Scary Disease Girl. The universe of people who are deeply invested disease geeks is passionate (thank you, constant readers) but it isn’t that large. And let’s face it, keen interest in things that could bring an end to civilization as we know it — hitherto-unknown pathogens, rampant antimicrobial resistance, nanotechnology run amok — isn’t like to earn repeat invitations to most dinner parties.

So you can imagine how I welcomed the publication of Fred Guterl’s new book, “The Fate of the Species: Why The Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction And How We Can Stop It” (Bloomsbury), a lean and thoughtful exploration of the possible impact on humankind of scary diseases, and many other potentially  bleak futures. In a series of deeply reported what-if essays, Guterl explores the worst-case scenarios that climate change, species loss, and viruses both real and digital might bring — and what steps we might take now to avert these imagined but plausible outcomes.

A necessary disclosure: Guterl is the executive editor of Scientific American, where I am a columnist on contract. But the book didn’t come to me as a result of that relationship; it was sent to me by a publicist who noticed this books series and had no notion of our connection.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: #SBSBooks, Climate Change, extinction, influenza, nanotechnology, SciAm, Science Blogs, Superbug Summer Books

The International AIDS Conference Returns: So Much Still To Do

July 22, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A quick Sunday note: At 5 p.m. today, Eastern time, something extraordinary will happen in Washington, D.C. It won’t look like much — just the opening of a big conference in a big convention center — but when the 19th International AIDS Conference begins its opening ceremonies, it will mark the first time in 22 years that the largest international gathering on the epidemic, the centerpiece of research and activism, has been held on US soil.

Twenty-two years is effectively one generation — there are probably people attending the conference who were not born when it was last held in this country — as well as two-thirds of the time this disease has been with us. So I think it’s worth underlining how momentous this is, and how it potentially signals a new moment in the long fight against HIV.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: AIDS, SciAm, Science Blogs

Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea: WHO Agrees It's An Emergency

June 6, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Image: KaptainKobold/Flickr

The World Health Organization has weighed in on the growing threat from antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, saying in a statement this morning (emailed, and apparently not online):

Millions of people with gonorrhoea may be at risk of running out of treatment options unless urgent action is taken, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Already several countries, including Australia, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom are reporting cases of resistance to cephalosporin antibiotics — the last treatment option against gonorrhoea. Every year an estimated 106 million people are infected.

The statement arrived as an adjunct to the launch of the WHO’s new global action plan for controlling the spread of resistant gonorrhea.

If you’ve been reading here for a while, the problem of resistant gonorrhea won’t be new to you. (Here are some past posts on data from the CDC and a call to action in the New England Journal of Medicine, along with a piece I wrote in Scientific American and a separate post by my SciAm editor Christine Gorman.) But in case you’ve just come in:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, CDC, drug development, gonorrhea, Resistance, SciAm, Science Blogs, Who

Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea: How We Lost Track

May 4, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

if I were starting this blog today, I’d be tempted to name it the Department of Unintended Consequences. So much of what I write about seems to belong in that zone: Send U.N. troops to Haiti, start a cholera epidemic. Aim to eradicate wild polio, clear the way for the vaccine-derived kind. Drive down the price of producing animal protein, ramp up antibiotic resistance.

Now add to the list: Develop cheap rapid tests for detecting sexually transmitted diseases, and lose the ability to track that those diseases are becoming resistant to the last antibiotics that work reliably against them.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, CDC, drug development, gonorrhea, Resistance, SciAm, Science Blogs

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