12.2019 | THE SCIENTIST 9Raised in Sydney, Australia,Archa Fox became interested in molecular biology during high school. “I have
a clear memory of that moment when I realized that my science teacher couldn’t answer my question to the
level at which I needed an answer, which was a bit of an epiphany. It really made me think about going to a
molecular level of understanding biology,” she says. Fox went on to get a bachelor’s degree from the Univer-
sity of New South Wales and a PhD at the University of Sydney before going abroad to do a postdoc in Angus
Lamond’s lab at the University of Dundee in Scotland. There, she had little idea that the first project she
worked on would lead to the discovery of an entirely new cell component, the paraspeckle.
“I think maybe a lot of people feel at the beginning of their postdoc that they’re casting around trying
to find things to do, things to work on,” she says. “I actually had written an application to go to [Lamond’s]
lab to work on a completely different project to the one that I ended up working on. So I did feel like a fish
out of water at the beginning.” In 2006, she moved back to her home country and started her own lab at
the University of Western Australia in Perth, where she has been studying paraspeckles ever since. Outside
of the lab, she enjoys hiking—or bushwalking, as she calls it—with her son and daughter. “I’m really fortu-
nate to live in a part of the world where we have amazing weather,” she says, but adds that there are profes-
sional tradeoffs to her Australian locale: “It takes four weeks sometimes for an antibody to arrive,” she says.
Read more about her paraspeckle discovery on page 34.When Emily Makowskiwas in eighth grade, she wrote a news article as an assignment in English class.
The piece impressed her teacher, who suggested she would make a good journalist. But Makowski didn’t
think much of the recommendation until years later. The 14-year-old was s hy, she explains, and “I never
really pictured myself interviewing people.”
Later, though, while working as a technician in a biology lab after graduating from Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland in 2016, Makowski began to warm up to the idea. “I studied mouse reti-
nas, and I remember I would annoy all my coworkers with random facts about eyes, like I would tell them
about how scallops can have 200 eyes,” she says. “I realized that I was just interested in so many more
things than I could focus on in one lab.” She began doing some freelance science writing on the side. A few
years later, she entered MIT’s graduate program in science writing, which she completed this September,
just before starting her internship with The Scientist.
Makowski enjoys conducting interviews and asking scientists about their work, but her favorite aspect of
science writing, she says, is “being able to translate complex scientific terms into ones that are easier for peo-
ple to understand.... Science is so cool, but I think sometimes people don’t know where to begin.”Immunologist James C. Zimring was inspired to write his first book by the students in a class he taught
on scientific methodologies in experimental biology. First at Emory University and later at the University of
Washington, students “really didn’t want to know how to do a Western blot, how to do PCR, how to do flow
cytometry,” he says. “They were more interested in questions of a kind of an epistemological nature,” such as
how scientific claims to knowledge are generated and where errors in understanding come from. He set out
to write course notes for the students to help answer their questions, and in the process realized that the same
questions that plagued them in the classroom were responsible for the disconnect between science and the
lay public. The project evolved into a book both for students of science and for a general audience. That book,
What Science Is and How It Really Works, was published in September.
Zimring, who joined the University of Virginia faculty in July after seven years at the Bloodworks
Northwest Research Institute and the University of Washington, says conflicting narratives about the value
and methods of research add to society’s confusion about how to interpret and weigh scientific claims.
“For at least the past several decades, the debate about science has been carried out by those who are not
involved in science itself. It’s very damaging,” he says. “I think it’s time—long past due, actually—that scien-
tists themselves get involved in the debate directly, which is what I’m trying to do.”DECEMBER 2019Contributors
HARRY PERKINS INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH, PERTH, AUSTRALIA; JUSTIN YU,
MIT; IMAGE COURTESY OF JAMES ZIMRING