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.