| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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| science track Glennda Chui, Newshound
When a massive earthquake leveled the Turkish city of Izmit last August, editors at the San Jose Mercury News asked their top science reporter if she'd go to Turkey to cover the unfolding tragedy. Glennda Chui had just filed a story comparing the quake to California's temblors. She knew that one fault that runs through the heart of the Bay Area, the San Andreas, bore a troubling similarity to the fault that had torn Turkey in two. A first-hand look at the situation, Chui realized, would give her and her readers important insights into California's own seismic future. The 46-year-old reporter called her husband to arrange care for their two young children. Then she dashed home to dig out her passport and pack a bag with jeans, hiking boots, a sleeping bag, and some trail mix left over from a recent backpacking trip. A few hours later, feeling somewhat stunned-it was, after all, her first assignment out of the country-she left home to catch an early morning flight to Istanbul. John Wilkes ranks Chui among the country's top four or five reporters who write about science. And Wilkes should know. He's the director of UC Santa Cruz's acclaimed graduate program in the specialized field of journalism known as science writing. Since 1993, Chui has taught one course a year in the program. It's her originality as a thinker and writer that impresses Wilkes most. "Glennda thinks about what is before her and takes her own approach to it," he says. "She never falls into cliché. And that's something few other people can claim." At first glance, there's little in Chui's childhood that hints that this keen-witted woman with glacier-blue eyes and a stubborn blunt nose would rise to the top of the field of science writing. The lawns and fences of the Hayward housing tract where she lived kept the natural world at bay. Her father was a pipe inspector, her mother a housewife with an eighth grade education. But because both were frustrated by their lack of schooling, there was never any doubt that their daughter would attend college. "I didn't realize until later how extraordinary that was," Chui says. "I lived in a lower middle class neighborhood, and a lot of other kids never had that assumption." It was a ninth grade biology teacher, Ronald Blake, who ignited a passion for science in his young student. On the first day of class he asked, "How do we know what is alive?" Then he talked about the crystalline state of tobacco mosaic virus, and DNA, and the Miller-Urey experiment that explored the origin of life on Earth. Chui was hooked. "That was a turning point," she says. "I loved that class." She was accepted to the University of California at Berkeley, but her parents feared that the big campus's radical politics would seduce their already-liberal daughter. So Chui spent two years at a community college before transferring to California State University in Hayward. When it came time to declare a major, she remembered Mr. Blake and chose biology. Only then did she discover she hated chemistry, and had no patience for the exacting work of research. She turned to the work she'd enjoyed most during her years at school-writing for the college paper-and got a job as a reporter for The Daily Review in Hayward. At the Review Chui slid into covering anything that touched on science: At a local level this meant toxic chemicals, energy problems, and the environmental issues debated by planning commissions and garbage boards. After seven years she returned to school, this time to Berkeley, and got a master's degree in journalism. The San Jose Mercury News snapped her up right after graduation, and two years later, in 1986, handed her the job she'd coveted: the full-time science beat. People who know Chui now are amazed to hear her confess that she shook in fright during her first interviews. Today she's direct, disarmingly informal, and renowned for leveling cut-to-the-chase questions at scientists. She dresses in comfortable cotton shifts, or jeans when she can get away with it, and cuts her breezy straw-colored hair in a fussless, shoulder-length style. Rumor has it that she sometimes tunes her car radio to KPIG ("107 oink 5 on your radio dial") to sing along with the station's "irreverent mix of country and rock." And Chui is a woman with a mission. She's keenly aware that most people end their science education when they leave high school. From then on, keeping up with science is "just one item in a long list of demands [people] are faced with every day," she says. Yet, from nuclear power to gene therapy, scientific advances are affecting people's lives more than ever before. As a writer, Chui wants to do more than simply explain the science and tell the story. She wants to write about the controversies and impacts. "For example," she asks, "is it a good idea to launch the Cassini spacecraft when it has plutonium on board? Or should we be allowed to use fetal tissues in stem cell experiments?" People need the information, she says, in order to make important decisions in their personal lives and to make informed choices as voters. Then there's the other kind of science stories, the ones Chui writes about "because they are just so cool." Like new evidence about what happened to the dinosaurs, or breakthroughs in the search for life on Mars. "These are the questions that my husband wakes me up at night wanting to discuss," she says with a laugh. But predictability is not part of Chui's job. What she actually ends up writing about is never totally under her control. She explains, "You might be cruising along thinking you're going to write your story about the elephant seals and all of a sudden there's a nuclear accident in Japan." Or an earthquake in Turkey. When Chui got to Izmit, people were still digging through rubble searching for survivors. She accompanied a band of scientists and engineers who stretched out the windows of their van shooting photos of collapsed buildings and bridges. Later they followed long ridges of raw earth and broken asphalt that traced the path of the ruptured North Anatolian fault. The heat was so intense that by nine every morning, Chui's shirt would be soaked through with sweat and her body covered with a sticky coating of dust from thousands of pulverized walls and roofs. In the evenings, she listened in on the scientists' meetings as they pondered the day's discoveries. Around midnight, after scrounging up a quick dinner, she'd start writing. During her six days in Turkey, Chui wrote four stories. She described in detail the remarkable insights gained daily by her team of researchers. As thrilling as these revelations were, though, Chui's words and the scientists' moods were tempered by the misery that was everywhere. Reading these stories, one is struck by their extraordinary balance of compassion and scientific excitement. Mastering a complicated topic in order to distill its essence for lay readers can be harrowing, says Chui, who sometimes finds herself operating right at the edge of her knowledge. But it's also rewarding. "What I stumbled into was a job where I get paid to learn every day,"she says, "and I get to learn from the best people in the world." Last year Chui wrote 91 stories for the Mercury, on subjects ranging from a physicist's manipulations of the speed of light, to a radical taxonomic regrouping of all life. With a scope like this, mistakes are inevitable. Chui discovered early in her career that there are lurking hordes of readers who jump on errors with the zeal of defensive ends sacking a quarterback. To her horror, she mistook the word "silica" for "silicone" in the first science story she ever wrote. Since then, she fastidiously checks each fact, assumption, and quote. This painstaking attention to detail has earned her great respect among scientists. "I'm so impressed by the breadth of science that Glennda covers, and her stories are great summaries for me, in all areas," says Mary Lou Zoback, who heads the Earthquake Hazards Team at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park. Zoback feels that Chui's desire to gain a fundamental understanding of the topics she covers sets her apart among reporters. And, Zoback says, Chui has a big fan club at the USGS. "I think we all value the relationship we have with Glennda. She's willing to pull on her boots and get down in the muck in the field with scientists." Liese Greensfelder writes about science and the environment from her home on San Juan Ridge in Nevada County, California. |
Spring 2000
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