I enjoyed my fellowship a great deal. I had in fact visited the HQ of Macmillan Publishing once before, and it was just as I remembered it - an amazing adapted warehouse with lofty atria, running right through the centre of the open-plan floors. I was working with the Nature Science Update (NSU) team under Sara Abdulla, and we were clustered on the top floor with the roof arching over us, giving us an enviable esprit de corps.

One of the first things that Sara gave me to look over was a guide to writing styles, written originally for the staff of the Economist. This guide, crystal clear and witty, is rightly legendary, and I am quite sure should be compulsory fare for all politicians, school pupils, and anyone prone to prosaic prose (Americans mostly, in my experience). So, for instance, someone is not "vertically challenged" - he or she is short. One is Newspeak worthy of 1984, the other is concise and universally understood. This was one of the most important lessons of my entire fellowship - as you read papers, books etc., how often do you come up against unnecessarily clumsy prose, either from scientists or others? I read an article about "Hitler's exterminationalist policies". There is no such word as "exterminationalist" -it sucks all the impact out of a shocking, visceral story. How about "Hitler's campaign of terror and mass murder"? This is an extreme example, and luckily I was never called upon to write a truly harrowing story during my time at Nature, but even so I lost count of the dull, vague comments I got from scientists. (e.g "This is very good and interesting research - and you can quote me on that"!). Make it short and snappy is my advice to researchers who get contacted by the media, or else your words won't get used at all.

I didn't think my writing style was too bad to start with - I had always felt I was quite a good communicator, which is why I was interested in the fellowship in the first place. Nevertheless, Sara certainly sharpened my skills considerably. Having said that, I never managed to get a story just right. No matter how hard I tried to take her refinements to heart, Sara would always send it back to me with dozens of changes; a lesson in humility for all those who huff and puff at what they see as the vulgarities and inaccuracies of the media perhaps. It ain't as easy as it looks!

I think it is fair to say that I had a rather faster turnover of work than some of the other fellows, and this was largely due to the NSU's format. Essentially, I would write articles based on "In-press" papers that hadn't been published yet. Often these were from Nature or it's sister journals, or from other journals for which we received embargoed press releases, etc. Sara usually picked the Nature stories for me, but I was responsible for finding & writing my stories from all the other journals.

My article and the paper it was based on had to appear simultaneously, which often set quite a tight deadline (For instance, receiving a press release on a Monday and getting the story out by mid-week). In that time, I had to get my head around the paper, write a draft, get comments from other researchers to give a balanced view, and then run it all by Sara and make corrections as necessary to her satisfaction.

The story often took only a few hours to write - counterintuitively it was the comments from other researchers that was most time-consuming, especially when I had to wait for Californians to get up and so on. Nevertheless, I managed 2-3 stories a week, and managed 4 stories on two occasions.

One problem I had getting usable quotes, quite apart from how dull most quotes were, was that some scientists didn't want to comment at all on a paper which they hadn't read in full. For some journals, I couldn't give them the entire paper, since it was still embargoed. As a scientist myself, I had some sympathy with this. Nevertheless, that is how things work - stories are only interesting to people like editors when they are fresh, i.e when the embargo lifts, and not two weeks later when everybody has had a good read through the paper concerned. The respected astrophysicist who told me huffily "I refuse to play my the media's unreasonable rules" should reflect on his double standards in this regard, since his web site proudly advertised and quoted from his recently published popular science book! (peer-reviewed? I don't think so)

Another factor that kept things ticking over quite quickly was that, since my stories eventually turned up on a web page, they did not have to fit into x inches of column space on the bottom left-hand corner of page 5 or anything like that - there was just text on a web page, galley-style, and so there wasn't a danger of my story being truncated or cancelled to make it fit physically. In that respect, what NSU does is more akin to a wire service such as Reuters - indeed, other journalists read NSU to get story ideas that they could put their own angle on.

Some newspapers in other countries (although not in the U.K) also bought NSU stories lock, stock and barrel, so it is possible that they appeared in print, under my name, in places as far flung as Italy or Canada - but I never knew about it, alas. I did however get to see a couple of my stories in print in Japanese, in the Tokyo edition of Nature!

Whilst many other science correspondents do similar things with embargoed papers etc., the difference perhaps is that I did nothing else - no reports on general themes or phenomena or suchlike. So, to go back to an example I mentioned earlier, I couldn't have done an article on flesh-eating bugs unless there was some major advance described in a peer-reviewed paper on the subject, which I could write up before it came out of embargo. For a newspaper, say, some Joe Public suffering from said bug is a story in itself. I still had to try and pick and write stories that would be of public interest, though - it was the source material that was perhaps more vigorously controlled at NSU.

Nearly all my stories were molecular biology-based, which is where I had my expertise from my PhD & postdoc. Nevertheless, I did make occasional forays into astrophysics, evolutionary biology etc. A full list of all my stories (as URLs, since they were all web-based) is given below. Interestingly, the subjects about which I knew the least were often the easiest to write - it was as though my background knowledge was getting in the way, making my stories too involved and wordy. Applying a variant of Occam's trusty razor - the simplest explanation is usually the best - proved invaluable, especially when it came to culling adjectives.

It was also enlightening to see the work of a major scientific journal from the inside - the meetings and memos about which papers would be accepted and in what issue and so forth. (A nice touch here - in an electronic age, Nature still seemed to be using bulging manilla envelopes stuffed with photocopies and handwritten notes). Often, NSU would siphon off promising manuscripts as the basis for our stories.

I would also write press releases, usually one per week. I only once made an error in a press release, and thankfully a minor one at that; having to issue corrections to press releases after the relevant scientists had complained was one of the nightmares of Nature's long-suffering press officer, Jo Webber. I also got to experience the various journalists and news organisations straining at the leash - one major Sunday broadsheet, which shall remain nameless, can no longer receive Nature press releases, since it couldn't resist breaking the awkward Thursday embargo the previous Sunday. Many other journalists faxed or 'phoned asking to be put on the list of recipients of the releases, which really made you feel you were at the centre of some vast web of information. I'm just glad I didn't cock it up too often!

My fellowship ended with the millenial BA Festival at Imperial College, which was quite a change of pace. Here the gloves came off as it were, and I was able to behave a bit more like a "typical hack". Now stories had to be written for a 2pm deadline the same day that they were presented at the festival! Although I still had to meet the high standards of Sara and her deputy, David Adam (who covered the festival with me), I found the format rather less restrictive; no waiting for hours to get prosaic quotes from west coast U.S academics or suchlike. Nevertheless, meeting the 2pm deadlines were quite panicky occasions, and I suffered my first, thankfully transitory, attacks of writer's block.

What most people don't appreciate is that journalists very rarely go to the lectures that they report on - how could they, when the lectures may take place after their early afternoon deadlines? Enter the shadowy world of the press conference, where the scientists give a private audience to the journalists in the early morning. Since the contents of the lectures were widely advertised, all the journalists were on the lookout for some new angle that would make it a novel story. For instance, a scientist who was reporting on a new way of monitoring epidemics mentioned in passing that he had detected a Salmonella epidemic… "Salmonella epidemic infects hundreds and kills two" screamed one newspaper's headline the next day (This is just the sort of story that NSU would not report). I used the same technique myself though - for instance, in the list of my stories below there is a report on using photodynamic therapy to treat clogged arteries. The vast majority of the press conference was about using photodynamic therapy to treat cancer, but my hunch, confirmed by Sara, was that the application to heart disease had the most value as a novel story.

I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of the festival, having sat in the dank press room chained to my laptop and brim-full of coffee. It was a suitable crescendo for my fellowship! It's just a pity that the festival was not more of a success. Imperial College was a huge building site at the time, and hardhatted workmen often outnumbered bemused members of the public. The hideous 1960s rabbit warren of Imperial did not lend itself to finding your way around easily, and regrettably lecturers and journos outnumbered the audience in all the lectures I attended. Nevertheless, I hope that the myriad of stories that the festival generated in the popular press shows that various fascinating lecture themes did indeed shine through.

Well, now it is all over, and I have gone back to my postdoc. Going back in the middle of a fuel blockade was an interesting coda; like a soldier returning from an unpopular war, any ideas that everyone would want to hear my tall tales from Nature were quickly punctured as the conversations turned to jerry cans, forecourt queues and so forth! So, that put me in my place!

To conclude, if you are reading this and you want to do a fellowship yourself as a springboard into science journalism, then I'd advise you to think very carefully. An awful lot of other scientists have had the same idea, and there is a vast pack of freelancers out there. Science correspondent posts are few and far between and attract hundreds of applicants.

On the other hand, do you feel, like I do, exasperated at the low profile of your lab or department? Do you think that your supervisor's work would make an excellent documentary, if only he'd change his shirt once in a while? If so, why not volunteer to write an article for your local paper, or visit a local school? (I have volunteered to do publicity work for my institute for instance, which doesn't have a press officer at present)

As a scientist with confident links to the media, you may well come to enjoy a happy and creative relationship with many journalists, or find yourself sliding into a media career at a later date. The Media Fellowship is an absolutely excellent first step, and I heartily recommend it!

Oliver de Peyer

opeyer@nimr.mrc.ac.uk

Please note that all these stories were only released on the web. Most of my stories were in the medicine or molecular biology categories, (Which Nature calls "lifelines"), although I also covered other categories such as physics (see below). These usually took a few days to research, with an average output of 2-3 a week.

All these stories were sub-edited to a greater or less extent, although this was par for the course for the Nature science writing team.

I also wrote stories "on the hoof" from the BA festival (see below).

I would give the web addresses for each article, but Nature has a bad habit of changing the URLs every couple of years! I suggest you go to the http://www.nature.com website and then use their search tool to track down the articles if you want to read more.

In rough date order (most recent 1st):

Medicine: The enemy within

(Endogenous retroviruses causing cancer)

Lifelines: Another bacterium gives up its secrets

(Genome sequence of P.aeruginosa)

Medicine: The APC of raising an army

(Dendritic cell immunotherapy for cancer)

Medicine: Herbal Extracts help fight cancer

Medicine: Bowel cancer advance

Medicine: Cracking Ebola's shell

(Crystallography of an Ebola virus protein)

Lifelines: Stop or grow?

(Telomerase could cause cancers)

Evolution: Like mother, like daughter

(Maternal imprinting of host species preference in cuckoos)

Ecology: Bacteria on the fly

(Aphids and bacteria in symbiosis)

Physics: What a drag

(Neutron stars and Relativity)

Chemistry: Seeing scents

(Reactive dyes detect chemicals)

All these stories were written at the festival in a few hours, "on the hoof", so to speak.

Medicine: Making light of it

(Using photodynamic therapy to treat blocked arteries)

Medicine: Snack attacks and hot spotty kids

(DNA fingerprinting can discover new bugs and trace international epidemics back to their source)

Phenomena: Natural beauty

(Jackson Pollock's paintings are fractal)

Policy: A matter of opinion

(Failures of opinion poll methodology)