Kitty Eisele / MAS 700 / Profile Classmate

3/1/2015

Meet Knight Science and Journalism Fellow Gideon Gil.

The Boston Globe is his professional home, where he’s been Health and Science Editor since 2003.

In Boston, where the health, science and tech industries have enormous footprints, that’s no small task.  He has a lot to tell us about, among other things, whether Harvard can clone humans or what happens to unused embryos, stories about which helped his editorial team win the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

Do you remember the many medical stories that came out of the Boston Marathon bombings?  Those were was under his watch, too.

As at many news organizations, the Globe has contended with cutbacks — its dedicated science section was eliminated in 2009, and Gideon’s reporters’ stories now appear throughout the paper and online.

He points out that you can always argue for strong science stories – but concedes the paper may not be doing as much to cover the non-life, and more basic, sciences.

This year at MIT Gideon is looking at how Big Data from health care can inform the stories his journalists tell.

He’s also challenging himself in the classroom:  he teamed with some bio-engineering and MBA students to build a version of the Eye-Wire project that works with Minecraft.

You can see some of that fusion of science and art as far back as the mid-1970s, when he wrote lively columns about on-campus speakers for the Harvard Crimson (“I’m afraid to go back and look”) as an undergraduate bio-chem major.

(That’s an undergraduate Gideon, below, doing something important with pipettes for a professor at Harvard Med).

In fact Gil thought he’d become a scientist.  But he spent the summer before his senior year at the Quincy Patriot Ledger, and discovered it was “a blast.”  And journalism had one other big benefit.

“Myself and another (Crimson) columnist had a following of groupies.  Some Wellesley women tracked us down – and that was tough to do in those pre-Internet days.  So the dating potential of these columns was my first recognition of the non-journalistic purpose of newspapers,” he said in a recent interview.

Gil went on to study for a master’s in journalism at Columbia before giving up the side benefits of the profession to marry Lisa Huber in 1985.  The family lives in Wellesley with this guy

while their 21 year-old daughter Liana is off at Syracuse, getting a degree in television, radio and film and doing some other neat things.

Want to know Gideon better?  If you want to fish out the microfilm, you can read through two decades of his stories for the Louisville Courier Journal, where he covered the development and use of the artificial heart.  Online or in print you can check out some of his own Globe reporting from here in Boston; or from this class, enjoy his compelling portrait of a Massachusetts ER at night.

Or you could just scan his Twitter feed @GlobeGideon to see the range of his interests and the many science topics he follows.

“What I try to do,” he explains, “is to help staff do deep narrative and explanatory pieces about what’s happening in the world of medicine and science.”

Does he succeed?  Let’s hear from Beth Daley, a former Globe science and environment writer, who calls herself one of his biggest fans.

The best anecdote about Gideon is being edited on a series many initially pooh-poohed at the Globe: Lyme disease.  Gideon, in his calm, thorough and mellow way went to bat for me, doing his own research to convince the higher-ups this seemingly odd story to focus a year on was one of the most important of our time. Not because we were writing about a disease, but because Lyme Disease represented a far more important point: A reluctance by the medical establishment to try and deal with uncertainty. It was classic Gideon – taking a small point to illustrate something even bigger.

He is also incredibly thorough – maddeningly so, virtually every reporter who works for him will tell you. For years, I would be tapping my foot at 9:30 p.m., front page editor yelling for copy before the presses ran, and Gideon would, ever calm, be going through a story line by line. He invariably would catch major errors, and add in context from some recess of his brain.

He’s very gentle, incredibly loyal.

That’s high praise from a reporter for an editor.   If you’re interested in good science writing, you should probably try to get to know him too.

Two hundred people died in an avalanche – not in the French alps, but in the Philippine capital of Manilla.  It was an avalanche of garbage that the city had thrown away. Hours later, David Jiménez Garcia stood at the bottom of the carnage of a monsoon-induced landslide that had weakened the base of a municipal waste dump and had ultimately caused it to collapse upon the homes of 800 families. “I couldn’t believe that there weren’t more journalists who cared,” Jiménez remembers today, speaking with a sonorous, soothing voice, as his hands rose up and crashed down to give life to the garbage avalanche.

While the government of the Philippines blamed the prowess of mother nature in 2000, Jiménez covered the stories of those who fell victim to it. Particularly those who had been stripped of alternatives by the government: The disenfranchised, the impoverished, the abandoned. Children are often the center of Jiménez’ stories, which are full of intimate observations, piercing detail, and illustrative context. The empathy and precision in his reporting are testimony to his long-standing experience in the region: David Jiménez Garcia was the first-ever Asia correspondent of a major Spanish newspaper.

His life began in Barcelona in 1971, when his native Spain was still under Franco’s rule. Born into a dictatorship, Jiménez grew up as his country grew into a new democracy. With the progressives rebuilding the government, his childhood coincided with the introduction of freedom of the press for Spaniards for the very first time. At 12, his family, including three siblings, moved to Madrid. After a high school exchange year in rural Texas, Jiménez enrolled at the local journalism school. Freelancing with Spain’s leading newspaper El Mundo during his last year in college turned into his first job.

At El Mundo, Jiménez covered whatever topic he could get his hands on. “Anything you can do in a newsroom, I did,” he remembers, before recounting how he walked into his editor-in-chief’s office one day with an idea: Latin America, Africa, and Europe were sought-after locations, while no Spanish newspaper had an Asia bureau or correspondent on the continent at the time. Jiménez wanted to go. His boss agreed and in 1998, David Jiménez Garcia became El Mundo’s first Asia correspondent. He stayed for 15 years.

Based first in Hong Kong and then in Bangkok, Jiménez covered wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, East Timor, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka; he reported on the two big tsunamis and five earthquakes, on revolutions in Burma and uprisings in the Philippines. He contributed to CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, and Esquire magazine. He wrote three books. He won awards.

Most reports penned by Jiménez are heavy human interest stories, playing out in the darkest corners of the world. But many turned into lighter endings. Jiménez chases these endings, following up on his stories and seeking out his former interviewees. “You owe something to the people you wrote about,” he says, “if you care about them, you go back and try to tell the end of the story.” He compiled a selection of juxtapositions, between the tragedy he witnessed during chaos and the uplifting denouement he often found upon returning years later, in his award-winning first book, Children of the Monsoon. Within a few years, Buttons of Kabul and The Happiest Place on Earth followed, equally filled by accounts of resilience, loyalty, and dedication in the face of poverty and violence. Always, Jiménez’ “prose is sharp as a machete” as Brook Larmer lauds, while La Republica calls his work “a journalistic battle against the demons of cynicism.”

Despite the adventurous, nomadic lifestyle of a war correspondent with endless travel and without set hours confined to an office, Jiménez seems to be battling these exact demons. Writing, for him, is a “a chance to fight against the indifference of the people who don’t have the chance to see what you see,” in the hope that his reporting would eventually impact people, move institutions to action, and affect small change.

An aficionado of in-depth investigation on the ground, Jiménez says some parts of the internet accrue to a “Weapon of Mass Disinformation”: Given the new wealth of facts and knowledge on the web, the average reader, viewer, and listener is so bombarded by digital artifacts that sifting through for quality, accuracy and genuine intellectual engagement has become a gargantuan task. And we have become lazy. Nonetheless, Jiménez muses that the visual avenues of the web are promising. Because the more ways to illustrate and distribute high quality stories, the better. Jiménez remains a journalistic zealot at heart.

Yet after 15 years of covering upheaval, hardship, and perseverance of the human spirit, Jiménez stopped. Now, reflecting on the luxury that the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard affords him, he has realized the toll that immersion into the extremes of the human condition has taken on him. “As a journalist you have a bag that you carry on your trips,” Jiménez says, shouldering an imaginary backpack as he talks, “and every time you see something bad and report on the darkest side of humanity one stone goes in the bag.” His fictitious rucksack is getting heavier. “At some point you can’t carry the bag anymore.” Support in such heavy moments comes from his family: After particularly gruesome trips, Jiménez’ wife and three kids pull him back to normality. This contrast is important, he says, to ground him in reality.

Three years ago, after Jiménez reported a story about self-immolating monks on an illegal trip to Tibet, the Chinese government banned him from re-entering the country. Jiménez smiles proudly when he tells this story, adding “it means I did my job well.”

Bianca Datta spends a lot of time with objects. We all do, but not like her; she designs them, makes them, thinks about them, and responds to questions from prying interviewers about them.

Bianca is a product designer and first-year graduate student in the MIT Media Lab’s Object-Based Media group. I wanted to learn a bit about her design sense and the ways she relates to objects in particular, so I showed her seven objects that each sparked a conversation about different aspects and stages of her life.

I started off easy. Bianca is from Maryland—Montgomery County, not Baltimore, which most people mistakenly assume (or maybe they just don’t know any other cities in Maryland). She explained her home state as a “microcosm of the US,” which, looking at the state’s map, she attributed in part to its geography. The peninsula, the panhandle, and the two major metropolitan areas each form their own identity.

Bianca then set off to Philadelphia to study at Penn’s School of Engineering. She knew that she wanted her work to have energy applications, and started off focusing on chemical engineering, but later found a home in Penn’s materials science lab as a Materials Science and Engineering major. She claims that chemical engineering didn’t work out because she is “not into math or physics,” which befuddled me. It’s all relative.

Bianca has many Penn mugs (all gifts) and paraphernalia, and when I ask which is her favorite, she ponders for a while: “that’s really tough. I have so many.” She settles on a hoodie that she got for being a residential advisor, which she likes not only for the color and comfort, but its associations; it reminds her of home, as well as camaraderie with her fellow RAs.

The mug itself also had significance: “I am really big on tea,” she says (she was late to our meeting because she was getting coffee). She associates tea with her family, and uses it as a way to connect with people; as an RA, she would offer tea to students to encourage them to stay and talk. Nowadays she organizes many of the Media Lab teas.

At Penn, Bianca took a formative product design class that led her towards her current work. One of the projects in that class was Dormitron, an RFID-operated door, which would replace your dorm’s traditional key with an RFID chip, making your dorm’s door work like the key card in the campus entrance, or a bit like a hotel room.

Bianca first downplayed the project by saying “every year somebody does an RFID thing [for the class],” and mentioned that there are still barriers to wide adoption due to security liabilities. But she also insisted that her team’s product was better designed than others. Although she regrets not being able to participate in the product’s actual fabrication, it was her first opportunity to go from idea to product.

Bianca spent one college summer in Minneapolis working for 3M, which introduced her to the corporate working world as a materials engineer. She was simultaneously impressed with the range of 3M and with their level of trust in her expertise and experience.

Her summer at 3M convinced her to go to graduate school, maybe to postpone the red tape (or poster tape?) of major corporations, and because she found that the most interesting work at 3M was being done by people with PhDs. It seemed like a good sign.

Although she was not working on improving 3M’s poster tape, she did have strong opinions: “I hate command hooks. They’re useless and always fall off the wall.” She points to 3M as proving that generic products are not all the same; her 3M sticky-notes stayed on longer and left less residue than the non-branded alternatives. Still, she notes, it’s not always worth the added cost.

Along with Partnews RA Alexis Hope, Bianca designed a digital input/output device during the famed Media Lab class “How to Make Almost Anything.” The project was initially an excuse to try out the Processing programming environment, which allows for interesting visual effects. If you press a button, the background changes; this allowed them to switch between a “moon” view and a “sunrise” view for the object.

Bianca’s final and favorite How to Make project was a nap pod called DUSK, which she tells me currently exists and lives in the Media Lab, so I plan to find it and sleep in it tomorrow. For her the project was exciting because she made it from scratch; it was “in my head, and now it’s real, and its big, and I get to use it.”

This book was on Bianca’s otherwise defunct Goodreads page, so she was surprised that I’d found it. On one hand Goodreads was just a “one-off thing” for her, but on the other, “this book is all about what I do.” It is a popular-scientific approach to materials and objects, with successive chapters on cement, paper, grass, and so on. Bianca’s current research examines how human beings relate and connect to materials; for instance, why we view some materials as stable, friendly, and durable, while others are considered foreign or cold. So this book is right up her alley.

Unsurprisingly, Bianca prefers paper reading over screen reading, which gives off the illusion of being “less serious.” But like most people, she makes plenty of concessions for the sake of digital convenience.

Bianca read Stuff Matters at Cambridge’s local Book Club for the Curious. As a first-year student, she felt like this connected her to the city and community. Whether tea mugs, hoodies, or books, Bianca associates her favorite objects with their social functions and associations. As an expert in things, her favorite things are the ones that connect her to her favorite people.