About Deborah Blum (excerpted from the author's web site):"There was probably no way for Deborah Blum to grow up as anything but a science writer. Her father, an exuberant entomologist, liked to bring his research home – “Check out this black widow. I’m going to keep its cage on the dining room table so we can watch it while we eat.” Her mother, a freelance writer, published a family newspaper and drafted her four daughters as staff reporters..."
"... she decided to become a scientist herself, and, in 1972, started college at Florida State University with a proposed chemistry major. She loved it – she still thinks chemistry is the most astonishingly beautiful science – but she did discover that a laboratory is no place for the absent-minded klutz..." "She transferred to the University of Georgia and graduated in 1976 with a major in journalism and a double minor in political science and anthropology. She worked for three newspapers... In Florida she had one of those epiphany moments – she’d learned to love journalism but she wanted to write about science, how it worked, what made it fascinating. She quit her job and went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying science writing in the journalism school’s specialized reporting program. Her advisor, Clay Schoenfeld, urged her to study the history of science – “You can’t really understand what you write about if you don’t know its history.” Blum went to work for many years as a science writer at newspapers in California. She won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting for her series on ethical issues in primate research, called "The Monkey Wars." Blum continues to write for newspapers, magazines and blogs. Currently, Blum is a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She is the author of a number of books, and has co-edited a guide to science journalism. "Maybe it was something about returning to the place where she had spent so many hours studying history of science, but Blum began working on books that used moments in history to explore the way that science works. She wanted to look at the way new ideas in science can change human culture..." |
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