Researchers have previously built electronic circuits using living cells. They achieved this by forcing living cells to behave in binary (digital) systems. But this is not energy efficient. And many cells are required to implement simple functions that transistors, the basic units of electronic circuits which are ten times smaller than a cell and more reliable, can perform.

Instead analog technology, which uses not just two states like digital but many, could be used to make cells do more complex tasks. Rahul Sarpeshkar, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, realised that chemical reactions inside a living cell are also analog in nature.

Chris Myers at the University of Utah, who like Sarpeshkar is an electrical engineer working on biological systems agrees. “Natural systems are more analog than digital,” he said. “They are also a million times more power efficient than our electrical systems despite using very poor components that produce lots of noise.”

Sarpeshkar, whose work has been published in the journal Nature this week, chose the bacteria Escherichia coli, commonly known by its abbreviation as E. coli, to make his calculator. For building it, he needed to create a way to input numbers, a program to execute the calculations and a way to count the output. All three of those functions would occur in living cells via chemical reactions.

The program for performing calculations was coded in synthetically made plasmids, which are circular DNA molecules, and injected into the bacteria. These plasmids, also called genetic circuits, have the ability to turn certain genes on or off. This starts a cascade of chemical reactions, eventually leading to the production of proteins.

Sarpeshkar’s E. coli cells were designed to produce proteins tagged with a fluorescent dye in response to the plasmids. These proteins could then be “counted” based on the amount of light they emitted when a laser activated the dye. Their calculator could perform addition, division and power-law computations.

Sarpeshkar’s aim is not to build computers using cells. That would be an inefficient use of the technology. Instead, Sarpeshkar said, “In the future, we may build more complex circuits that ‘compute’ whether a cell is cancerous or not and destroy it if it is.”

There have been preliminary studies where genetic circuits put into bacteria can communicate within a population of cells. That population can then sense their environmental condition and decide to perform a response. This means Sarpeshkar’s plan to kill cancer cells using cells that can compute may not be as far-fetched as it might seem.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

Founded in 2008, Sarvajal—which in Sanskrit means “water for all”—now sells clean drinking water to more than 70,000 people in rural India. In bigger villages, it employs local people to man filtration plants and sell water. In small villages it installs solar-powered water dispensing machines (pictured) that use prepaid (or pay-as-you-go) smart cards that can be topped up just like a mobile phone. The machines send data to a central server via SMS, which helps Sarvajal ensure regular supply of clean water.

Sarvajal started with some help from the Piramal Foundation, a charity. And it is not alone: Water Health International was launched with an investment from the Acumen Fund and the Naandi Foundation’s not-for-profit company was backed by a charity with the same name. What sets Sarvajal apart is that it has stayed away from government subsidies while still keeping the price of water low. It sells 10 litres of water for four pence (or six cents), just as much or lower than its competitors.

“Subsidies are not a long-term solution,” says Anand Shah, Savajal’s founder, who grew up in America and moved to India to become a social entrepreneur. It took a healthy bit of tinkering to lower the price of installation and maintenance for its water supply infrastructure. It costs on average $2,500 to install a filtration plant, which is about half the expense of similar projects. Sarvajal claims to recover those costs within three years.

Setting up its project was not easy. Savajal needed to deal with things that few businesses in rich countries have to worry about: lack of proper roads in villages, irregularity of power supply, unreliability of water sources and devising a system of money transfer. Having reached a respectable size, Mr Shah is hopeful that scaling up his business further will be less challenging.

Apart from villages, Sarvajal’s other obvious market is the urban poor. Nearly 100m people live in very densely populated slums in India’s cities. They are more willing to pay a higher price for water than villagers who have a much smaller disposable income. But Mr Shah says that “water barons”, sellers of bottled-water, have been trying to block Sarvajal’s entry into cities. After many months of efforts, this time not without help from the government, Sarvajal will soon be launching its first filtration plant in Delhi.

First published on economist.com.

Some suggeseted that species in which females lay eggs that are big compared to their bodies may need more time to recover after laying eggs and males perform nest chores to compensate. Others fingered high levels of nest predation, which prompts females to seek more males to mate with, in order to produce more offspring, and leave nests untended; again, males pick up the slack. Neither hypothesis had robust data to back it up.

In 2000 Tamas Szekely, an ornithologist at the University of Bath, put forward an alternative explanation. What determines the role adopted by each sex, Dr Szekely contends, is the ratio of males to females. Typically, females outnumber males. This means a male mates with a female once and goes off in search of another willing partner, leaving the mother to tend the nest. Where the ratio favours males, however, the fathers might care for the young rather than face stiff competition to woo another female. Since the supply of males is low, females compete for them instead.

This idea remained untested, however, mainly because finding reliable data on animal sex ratios is tricky. But Andras Liker, Dr Szekely’s colleague at the University of Sheffield, believes he has found some. For over 20 years researchers around the world have been painstakingly collecting data on waders. Studies by Dr Liker and Dr Szekely showed that the data were good enough to test the sex ratio hypothesis.

As they report in Nature Communications, wading birds’ sex roles are indeed correlated with the sex ratio in 16 of the 18 species they tested. In the five species in which females outnumber males (ruffs and northern lapwings, for instance) mothers care for their brood. In the 11 male-dominant species, including Jesus birds and greater painted snipes, by contrast, it is the fathers who look after the nestlings.

Sex ratios are, of course, in part determined by precisely the sort of behavioural traits Drs Szekely and Liker strive to explain. The reason this does not lead to a chicken-and-egg problem, as it were, is that sex ratios are also a function of other factors, like different mortality rates among adult males and females, themselves the result of things like body size.

Dr Szekely's idea may help explain why sex-role reversal seldom happens in mammals, where sex ratios tend to favour females (though mammalian males also lack females' ability to produce milk). It might even, Dr Liker speculates, shed light on other social behaviour in animals, such as homosexual pairing, possibly triggered byof a shortage of available partners of the opposite sex.

First published on economist.com.

1. Are test scores the best way to evaluate student's learning?

The studies I quote (references to which can be found here) also took into consideration other factors. For instance, the Peru study looked at behaviour of the students: enrolment, attendance, study at home, and reading habits. While even this is not perfect a way to evaluate students, but I believe it enough to draw conclusion about the success or failure of this large scheme.

2. India already has plans in place to take care of malnourished children. There are mid-day meal programs and healthcare program like the National Rural Health Mission (NHRM). Isn't it ok for the Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry to work on other issues?

This is true. But consider the fact that NHRM was started in 1975. In nearly 40 years it has not been able to cut down the number of malnourished children. More than 40% still suffer from stunted growth, which means that they don't reach their proper physical or mental potential. Read detailed report here. These are serious worries, and despite government's efforts little has happened. One of the reasons may be that it is not just the lack of food that is causing malnutrition. Read this excellent article to find out more.

3. Many schools don't have access to books beyond their curricula. Aakash will enable them to get that access without added expenditure. Isn't that good?

I'd accept the first argument about scalability But one needs to weigh the utility of gaining more knowledge while most of those who will get it may not even have the basic knowledge to approach the idea gaining more knowledge.

4. The infrastructure requirement for 3G is minimal when compared to building schools and it has a profit component which invites private expenditure. Even if it's not profit-based, it's easier for the govt. to deal with huge mobile companies than with different contractors working in every village.

The physical infrastructure needed for Aakash might be less, but the software and educational material that will be needed for it is by no means a small project. It is scalable as it can be deployed on all tablets at once, but the implementation of that material will need teachers on the ground. So I don't think it's as easy as that.

5. This is only the beginning. The trickle down effect of this initiative will be large.

This particular comment can be made about pretty much every initiative of the Indian government. See the NHRM example in answer 2 above.

6. Your complaint of poor hardware is justified, but if that is overcome then content will reach more people. The content is there, look at Khan Academy

It's nice to hope that content that worked for the west will also work for India. See answer 4.

Some notable comments below:

It also seems that the government has taken pre-orders for the device. From an email:

I've made an advance payment of Rs. 2999 for the much publicized Aakash Tablet by GOI in Feb 2012. Now even after a year, Datawind has not delivered it. My reminders are answered with a reply stating that the delivery is under process.

On The Hindu's website:

From Himanshu:

The middle ages had Tughlaq and his leather currency .. we have Sibal and Akash.

From AAKASHHULK:

ITS JUST A POLITICAL TRICK TO GRAB A FEW VOTES.

From Saurabh Sharma:

I got a SIM Card buy just showing my Aadhar card. The pleasure was immeasurable. For once I felt I was a decent human being and not a punching bag of government rules. Aadhar is another favourite punching bag of pessimists and armchair critics.

From S Nandakumar:

Whatever said and done even in the age of e-learning and Computer Based Training there is nothing like effective classroom interaction between students & teachers

The last few days have brought the Aakash tablet back into the media limelight. Last Friday, Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister M.M. Pallam Raju said that troubles with the manufacturer could doom the project. But the next day, former HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, who started the project, denied Mr. Raju’s comments. He further added: “I want public services to be delivered through Aakash. I want Aakash to be a platform for 1.2 billion people.”

Before Mr. Sibal sets more ridiculous targets and spends taxpayers’ money on them, he needs to be stopped. His fanciful ideas are wrong. First, there is no evidence that a tablet can solve any of the problems that he claims it can. Second, it is not clear how the Indian government will ever be able to produce (or procure) a tablet that costs less than $35.

Root of the idea

The idea for the Aakash tablet and troubles that the project brings with it have both been inherited from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project launched in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. OLPC’s hope was that empowering children in the developing world with computers connected to the internet will help them learn faster, develop better skills and reach their full potential.

But there were problems with the idea right from the start. First, it hadn’t been tested on a large enough population to make a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Second, the project claimed that scaling up production will reduce the cost of each laptop below Rs.5,400 ($100), though they weren’t sure how. Third, OLPC thought better education was the panacea to all problems irrespective of a country’s needs.

Despite these issues, OLPC received backing from the United Nations Development Programme in 2006. With this stamp of approval, its large-scale implementation began. About eight years after its launch, the results are in and OLPC hasn’t done so well.

Tested in Peru

Peru was the site of the largest experiment. More than 8,50,000 laptops were given out at a cost of Rs.1080 crore ($200 million). In treatment schools where the number of laptops per child was increased from 0.12 to 1.18, a report by the Inter-American Development Bank found that OLPC failed in its goals. Test scores in languages and maths remain dismal. Enrolment isn’t higher than what it was before.

A 2010 study in Romania, another middle-income country, found that those children who were given laptops were, not surprisingly, more proficient in its use. But they did not score anymore in exams than those who didn’t have computers. Even in a low-income country like Nepal, a small-scale study produced the same results. Furthermore, the price of each laptop, up until 2010, remained at more than Rs.10,000 ($200).

More than 20 lakh laptops have been handed out so far. Berk Ozler, senior economist at the World Bank, argues that OLPC is a mess. A report by Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames of the University of California Irvine, says: “Unlike Negroponte’s approach of simply handing computers to children and walking away, there needs to be integrated education improvement efforts.” It is not clear how governments all around the world fell for the scheme that is backed by little evidence.

OLPC’s latest victim is India, even though Aakash is not a laptop. Mr. Sibal, like Negroponte, considers Aakash to be the panacea to all problems. It’s not just that. Mr. Sibal also wants Aakash to be the cheapest tablet. This has proved to be a major hurdle. Datawind, a Canadian company, won the tender to provide tablets at a cost of less than $35. Its first version failed miserably because of poor hardware. The newer version seemed more promising, but it looks like Datawind will default on its promise to deliver 1,00,000 units by March 31.

Even if the government somehow, however difficult it may seem, is able to get access to cheap tablets, they are not going to help achieve its aims. Can a laptop overcome the negative impact of a bad teacher or poor school? Can it make children smarter despite the lack of electricity, water, toilets or playgrounds? Can it overcome the limitations of stunted growth among the malnourished? Can Aakash increase productivity of the workforce to counterbalance the money invested in it?

There is no evidence that it can do any of these things. And yet, the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology “strongly hinges around a low-cost device through which the content created can reach the learner.” This adoption of OLPC’s main idea is fraught with problems. Warschauer and Ames rightly argue that handing out laptops, or in India’s case, tablets, ignores the local context and thus avoids solving any of the targeted problems.

Right now when government officials are themselves confused over the future of Aakash, it is important to step back and analyse the reasons for pressing forward with a hopeless idea. Without concrete evidence, it would be foolish to continue.

This is a referenced version of an Op-Ed that was first published in The Hindu.

The seeds can be caused by the passage of exotic things like cosmic rays. More often, though, they are dust particles lofted high into the air. A study in 2009 showed that dust from Taklimakan desert in China, whisked above 5,000 metres, circumnavigated the globe in just 13 days. Because dust needs large horizontal distances to attain sufficient altitude, it might then cause rainfall half-way across the world.

For example, the Rocky Mountains in America push water vapour to higher altitudes that help form clouds. At that point, the theory goes, the clouds run into particles swept in from Africa and Asia. To find if that is indeed what happens Kaitlyn Suski and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, examined dust and clouds in Californian skies, to the Rockies' west. They report their findings in Science.

Ms Suski needed to confirm that dust particles reached heights of about 3,000 metres or more to be able to intercept rain clouds. She also had to verify that they originated in Asia and Africa. She collected samples in an aeroplane equipped with a mass spectrometer, which can accurately determine the dust's chemical composition. These chemical signatures were then compared with those found in Asian and African deserts. As a cross-check, Ms Suski used data from satellites like CALIPSO, which tracks dust particles' atmospheric peregrinations.

Perhaps more interesting, Ms Suski also found that rain clouds contained bacteria, though it proved impossible to pin down their origins. Tiny living organisms can float in the atmosphere for a long time, feeding on trace carbon and any other nutrients they bump into. They can also act as cloud seeds.

In 2010 researchers in Norway concluded that bacteria are not as important to rainfall as dust is. But calculations by Ms Suski and her colleagues suggest that their rainmaking powers are amplified when they mingle with desert dust. Deserts may be some of the harshest places on the planet to live, but, if Ms Suski is right, they may be the enablers of life everywhere else.

First published on economist.com.

Reference: Creamean et al. Science 2013. Dust and Biological Aerosols from the Sahara and Asia Influence Precipitation in the Western U.S. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1227279

Written with Alex Flint

Beyond all the needs that it fulfils, all technological innovation is underpinned by a common driving force: how to make information flow more efficiently. From when the first modern humans walked the earth, we’ve assumed that it was their survival instinct that drove innovation. It certainly has, but we forget that without the ability to efficiently pass on information from one generation to the next, our ancestors would’ve had to reinvent the most basic things every time they needed it.

From the beginning of human civilisation till today, our aim has been to increase, what can be termed, brain to brain bandwidth. The idea encompasses not just flow of information from one person to the other but also how effectively it is transmitted, that is how well it is understood or used by the person receiving it.

We’ve come to associate the last 50 years with the period when the information revolution took place. But that is because the industrial revolution that preceded it made life easy enough for us to focus primarily on information and its transmission. Is the information revolution slowing down though? Certainly not.

The machine of the dreamers

The personal computer was expected to make its way into every home well before the 1990s. But its limitations with speed and memory did not let that happen. Its main users for many years were technology geeks, nerds and hackers.

While no one doubted the achievement of Apple I from a purely technical standpoint, giants of the field like IBM did not believe in the dream of the PC-enthusiasts. In 1976 it was hard to imagine how exactly an abstruse gadget in a wood-casing with the title “Apple I” scrawled over the headpiece would have a large impact on ordinary life. But should it have been so difficult? The fundamental role of information in our lives seemed to have been underplayed.

By the time the personal computer, as we know it*, was first built, it had already been over a decade since Gordon Moore’s prediction that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every two years^.

A general purpose information processing device was going to be in demand and would become cheap enough for many to afford. But it still took a genius and a rebel like Steve Jobs to force the incumbents to accept that the PC age had begun.

The byproduct of science

The next innovation after the PC that had a comparable impact on humanity’s brain to brain bandwidth was the internet. What the PC made possible was a better way to access and manipulate information. The advent of the internet brought things a step further by enabling us to connect such information with relative ease.

However, like the PC before it, mass adoption took time. After being invented as a means of transferring data between physicists, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s idea took off in the mid-90’s. Since then the internet has disrupted not just information transfer mechanisms but many other markets. From the postal system to the education system, anything that has information transfer at its heart has been changed by the internet.

The rise of social

While many might dispute social media as the next big innovation, there is little doubt that adding a personal touch to information flow has made a huge difference. Defined as a website that allows you to make a profile page, connect with friends and view your friends’ connections, the first social networking website was SixDegrees.com launched in 1997.

Since then, of course, social networking sites like MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and, most recently, Google+ have drawn hundreds of millions of users. Even though Facebook is not quite worth $100 billion just yet, the sheer number of users of Facebook has helped it create a parallel world of its own on the internet. Just a little less than half the world’s internet users have Facebook accounts. It’s not just Facebook and Twitter though. Social news sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon draw large crowds too.

But innovation in this sector is reaching a plateau. All social networking websites have essentially the same features: profiles, news feed, data-sharing (photos, links, documents, etc.) and many ways of bringing users together in groups or by direct communication. We’ve reached a point today when people are spending less time on social networks than before.

Virtually face to face

The next innovation needed in increasing our brain to brain bandwidth are being touted to come from wearable computing, be it smartwatches or products like Google Glass. But these seem like an incremental development rather than one that is paradigm-shifting.

What we really need is a virtual way to replicate the water-cooler effect. The effect is named after the phenomenon that colleagues in an office meet at a water-cooler, which leads to serendipitous exchange of ideas. It is thought that the internet has led to the decline of these chance events happening, and thus slowed down the pace of innovation.

It was this that formed the core of a recent note from Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, that asked Yahoo employees to stop working from home. Many decried Mayer’s note, calling her out of touch with reality. But she has a point because there is a lot of value in face to face communication. No innovation yet has come close to solving that problem.

A solution to this problem will truly impact the world. Economists have found out that the easiest way to double world GDP is to get rid of international borders. Which, of course, is a politically implausible proposition. But if technological development could allow virtual presence of a person to be nearly as good as real presence, this dividend would not remain an unrealised one.

And perhaps Yahoo workers could start working from home again.

* Many will dispute which exactly was the first personal computer. Perhaps it was GENIAC built in 1955. The Apple II built in 1977 was the first mass-produced PC. But the first PC with a graphic user interface, that we have become so accustomed to, was Lisa built in 1983.

^ The often-quoted period of 18 months was a modification by David House, of Intel, who said the growth in computing power will come not just from more transistors but also from faster ones

First published on medium.com. Image from here.

What is the commonest living thing on Earth? Until now, those in the know would probably have answered Pelagibacter ubique, the most successful member of a group of bacteria, called SAR11, that jointly constitute about a third of the single-celled organisms in the ocean. But this is not P. ubique’s only claim to fame, for unlike almost every other known cellular creature, it and its relatives have seemed to be untroubled by viruses.

As Jonathan Swift put it in a much-misquoted poem, “So, naturalists observe, a flea/Hath smaller fleas that on him prey”. Parasites, in other words, are everywhere. They are also, usually, more abundant than their hosts. An astute observer might therefore have suspected that the actual most-common species on Earth would be a “flea” that parasitised P. ubique, rather than the bacterium itself. The absence of such fleas (in the form of viruses called bacteriophages, that attack bacteria) has puzzled virologists since 1990, when the SAR11 group was identified. Some thought the advantage this absence conferred explained the group’s abundance. But no. As they report in this week’s Nature, Stephen Giovannoni of Oregon State University and his colleagues have discovered the elusive phages. Swift’s wisdom, it seems, still holds good.

Tracking down a particular virus in the ocean makes finding a needle in a haystack look a trivial task. A litre of seawater has billions of viruses in it. Modern genetic techniques can obtain DNA sequences from these viruses, but that cannot tie a particular virus to a particular host.

To do so, Dr Giovannoni (pictured) borrowed a technique from homeopathy: he diluted some seawater to such an extent that, statistically speaking, he expected a 100-microlitre-sized aliquot to contain only one or two viruses. The difference between his approach and a homeopath’s was that what homeopathy dilutes almost to nothing are chemicals, and thus cannot breed. A virus can, given a suitable host. So he mixed each of several hundred aliquots into tubes of water containing P. ubique. Then he waited.

The race is to the Swift

After 60 hours, he looked to see what had happened. In most cases the bacteria had thrived. In a few, though, they had been killed by what looked like viral infection. It was these samples that he ran through the DNA-sequencing machine, in the knowledge that the only viral DNA present would be from whatever it was had killed the bacteria.

His reward was to find not one, but four viruses that parasitise P. ubique. He then compared their DNA with databases of DNA found in seawater from around the world, to find out how abundant each is. The upshot was that a virus dubbed HTVC010P was the commonest. It thus displaces its host as the likely winner of the most-common-living-thing prize.

That does depend, of course, on your definition of “living thing”. Some biologists count viruses as organisms. Some do not. The reason is that a virus relies for its growth and reproduction on the metabolic processes of the cell it infects. This means viruses themselves are hard to parasitise, since they do no work on which another organism can free-ride. Which is why the next two lines of Swift’s poem, “And these have smaller fleas to bite ’em/And so proceed ad infinitum”, are wrong—and why, because HTVC010P itself can have no parasites, it probably really is the commonest organism on the planet.

First published in The Economist.

References:

1. Zhao et al., Abundant SAR11 viruses in the ocean, Nature, 2013.
2. Brown et al., Global biogeography of SAR11 marine bacteria, Mol Syst Biol, 2012.
3. Swift, Poetry: A Rhapsody, 1733.

Finding new uses for old or failed drugs is on average 40% cheaper than inventing a new drug from scratch: it allows to skip the early stages of development. Since coming up with a new drug can cost more than $1 billion, such savings are nothing to sneeze at. Repurposing also trims the risk of failure because new drugs hit a dead end mostly during the early stages of development.

In 2007, a report in Nature, a science journal, counted 41 drugs that have found new uses. But there should be many more, experts say. This is why America’s National Institutes of Health, the country’s biggest government agency financing drug research, and the Medical Research Council, its British counterpart, each have launched new grant programmes. Worth $20m and £10m ($15m) respectively, they are meant to allow university researchers analyse failed drugs from big pharma firms such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly and see whether they can be repurposed.

Yet such schemes are not enough, as work by Grant Churchill, a researcher at Oxford University, shows. In a recent paper in Nature Communications, another science journal, he describes how he and his colleagues looked for a drug to treat bipolar disorder, which causes uncontrollable mood swings. Instead of developing a new compound, they tested a library of known ones and found that ebselen, a drug first developed to treat stroke, was a candidate. Their claim, based on animal tests, is that ebselen is as good as and much safer than lithium, currently considered the best treatment for bipolar disorder.

But this was where things hit a hurdle that is hard to overcome. Universities do not have the money to further develop promising drug candidates that need to be tested on a large scale. Expensive human trials are usually carried out by pharma firms, which own the patent for a drug and thus can hope to make their money back. But in the case of many repurposed drugs, like ebselen, the patent has expired. Filing for a new one, which is possible, is not of much help: patients could simply buy versions of the drug which are already available from other makers.

One way of solving this problem would be to change the patent system, for instance by extending the length of patent protection, but this could hamper innovation in other ways. A better solution, argues Benjamin Roin, a law professor at Harvard University, is to have regulators grant the drugmaker that has repurposed the drug some exclusivity and thus time to recover research costs: it is rare that a drug is used in the same form and the same dosage for two different diseases; regulators could wait a few years before they allow other firms to offer the drug for the new purpose. If old drugs can learn new tricks, regulators should do so, too.

First published on economist.com.

References:

1. Singh et al., A safe lithium mimetic for bipolar disorder, Nature Communications, 2013.
2. DiMasi et al., The price of innovation: new estimates of drug development costs, Journal of Health Education, 2003.
3. Chong & Sullivan, New uses for old drugs, Nature, 2007.
4. Roin, Unpatentable Drugs and the Standards of Patentability, Texas Law Review, 2009.

Cottrell, who spends every possible hour of the day reading new content on the web, has written an article in the Financial Times that has some important lessons for young writers like us (if you can’t get through the FT paywall try this). I’ve distilled them for you here:

1. Only 1% of all writing on the internet is great writing, and even that is an “embarrassment of riches”.
2. Great writers produce great writing, and the bad ones cannot be rescued.
3. His golden rule is: the writer is everything. And a corollary: the publisher (with a few exceptions) is nothing.
4. We live in a world of ideas and they are not restricted by source or medium.

All of the above taken together paints a rather depressing picture for young writers. The honest truth is that the market we’ve entered is full of great writers who produce ever more great writing, leaving ever little time for us to find a readership for our work. Despite the difficulties, there are some ways to overcome these huge hurdles.

The antidote

To cheer myself up, here are two things that I read/watched after Cottrell’s article:

First: Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech to the Berkeley Journalism School

Krulwich shares some of  Cottrell’s views, but he serves them on a kinder platter. Krulwich says that journalism has reached a point where there are no guarantees that any big publishing house will give you a safe job, irrespective of how good you are. So if you are waiting to get picked, your chances are pretty low. Instead go out there and start doing. “There are some people who just don’t wait,” enthuses Krulwich. This is not a fanciful advice. There are examples like that of Ed Yong, Brian Switek and Alexis Madrigal, who’ve managed to build a career on their own terms.

Second: Avi Steinberg’s article in the New Yorker: Is writing torture? (on Gilbert vs Roth)

The article tells the story of Julian Tepper, a wannabe novelist, who was told by Philip Roth, an accomplished novelist, to quit writing. Roth said, “It’s an awulf field. Just torture. You write and write, and you have to throw most of it away because it’s not any good.” In response Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray and Love, wrote that there are few professions that come close to the pleasure that writing can give.

But it was Avi Steinberg’s take on the whole matter that most convinced me. He says that authors like Roth are correct in that writing can be a torture, especially if it is something that you want to make a living out of. And what Roth tried to do by dissuading Tepper was perhaps good too, because it is better to be aware of the harsh reality of being a writer than to go in to it being ignorant. It is those who can say: “Listen, I don’t care what you tell me. I know it’s a bad idea, but I’m determined to do it, and I will do it,” are those who will be able to succeed in this profession.

Science writing is not fiction, but it is still writing. And at the heart of our profession is our desire to convey thoughts and ideas, mostly through scientists’ work. But we do it because we enjoy it. We are fascinated with the world of science and we want to share stories that amaze us. That to me is enough reason to keep trying.

So what can we do get to that 1% of great writing?

Somewhere in Cottrell’s article I can smell the rotten stink of the innate talent hypothesis, which says that great writers are born to be great writers. I’m sorry but I don’t buy it. I hated English in school, but that was because fiction was not my thing. My education was structured in a way that fiction was given undue importance in writing. Then when I finally realised that non-fiction writing is just as great (if not better), I started to work on it. If I read my blog posts from two years ago, I can see myself in that writing but mostly I see how much I’ve improved since. Of course I have a long way to go, but great writing can come from lots of practice. Period.

I’ll also argue that, while the publisher may be nothing for Cottrell, it is a great place for young writers to vie to be. Great publications are great because they have fantastic editors. Even now articles that I submit to the same editors come back with lots of red marks. Every time this happens, I learn what it is that I need to improve the next time. And I’m not the only one, even accomplished writers have their work decimated. So writing for publications is not just a way of reaching an audience but also it is the secret of rapidly improving your writing.

Finally I would say that while there is a lot of science stories out there, most of them aren’t written well. For instance, it kills me a little every time when I see someone share a link to sciencedaily.com or physorg.com, which are news aggregating websites that share press releases, when some science writer has actually written a story about the same piece of research. And while Cottrell is right that we live an age where ideas matter not the source or the medium that carry them, there is a lot of value that writers can add to make the ideas clearer and spread faster.

Cottrell’s article was a nice slap in the form of a reality check, but it only makes me want to work harder and write better. And someday I know I’ll have an article featured on The Browser.

First published as a guest post on scientificamerican.com (SA Incubator blog).