Last year I talked to a primatologist in his mid-80s, still sharp, still in his office most days, a pleasant spot in California, surrounded by his books and by younger colleagues who adored him. He wore khakis and a red plaid shirt and desert boots — I didn’t know you could even find desert boots anymore — and had marvelous recall and sense of humor. I was there to ask him mainly about the work of a long-ago colleague of his, someone whose work overlapped with his but not enough to make things too competitive. They both worked for a certain lab early in their careers, though at different times, and had followed each others careers, and he remembered all sorts of gems and insights and stories, always in language colorful and plain and free of jargon. A splendid interview that at two hours was too short.

When we’d covered my main line of questioning, I asked him if he could tell me about the work he was doing back then, 60 years before — work that stirred some fundamental changes in the field. He laughed and said, “Well sure. That’s an interesting story to me. I’ll have to restrain myself.” Then he told me about it, utterly riveting work. I didn’t want to take more of his time at this point, so I skimmed my notebook and memory for things I needed to ask him but had not. My interviews tend to wander a bit. By then he’d grokked to this flightiness of mind.

DD: Oh. Where did you say you grew up?

Subject: You didn’t ask me.

DD: Where did you grow up?

Subject: I was born in Mountain View.

Sometimes you can’t say thank you emphatically enough.

Dandelions are beautiful too.

As faithful readers know, I’m working on a book, provisionally titled The Orchid and the Dandelion and likely to be published next year, about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis: the notion that genes and traits that underlie some of humans’ biggest weaknesses — despair, madness, savage aggression — also underlie some of our greatest strengths —  resilience, lasting happiness, empathy. If you’re used to the disease model of genes that are associated with mood and behavioral problems, this hypothesis can seem puzzling. The turn lies in viewing problems such as depression, distractibility, or even aggression as downsides of a heightened sensitivity to experience that can also generate assets and contentment.

I first wrote about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis in an Atlantic article two years ago. Last week, New Scientist published a feature I wrote about some of the research I’ve come across while researching the book. The article is behind a paywall now, so you’ll need a subscription to read it; I’ll post the whole thing here in a few weeks when the New Scientist exclusive-run period ends. In the meantime,  I thought I’d excerpt here a couple passages of particular interest.

One is the opener, which describes how toddlers react to a clever test of their generosity and then lays out the gist of the hypothesis. The other is a multigenic study that sought to expand the hypothesis beyond single-gene candidate-gene studies.

First the toddlers; I couldn’t resist any trial this clever — or a treat called Bambas:

Why do some three-year-olds share more than others? To find out, psychologist Arial Knafo deploys what we can call Bamba test. At Knafo’s large, playroom-like lab at Jerusalem University, a toddler spends an hour or so drawing, playing games, and making dolls with a friendly research assistant before the assistant announces snack time and brings out two packages of Bambas — peanut-butter-flavored corn puffs much coveted in Israel. The child’s pack, like every normal pack, holds 24 of the little treats. But when the researcher opens her pack, she laments, “Mine has only three!” Which it does, for the research assistant has earlier removed the rest so as to set up this test of social perception and generosity: Will this three-year-old across from share without being asked?

Most do not. “Self-initiated sharing is a difficult task,” says Knafo. “You have to detect the need, then decide to do it.”

A few 3-year-olds, however, will offer their Bambas. And in this study, the toddlers most likely to share happened to carry a gene variant generally tied to antisocial behaviour. A pile of previous studies had examined this variant — the “7R” (or long-repeat) version of DRD4, a gene that affects levels of dopamine, a key neurotransmitter — and found showed that it put people at extra risk of attention and conduct problems if they had harsh or emotionally distant parents. These studies gave this 7R variant a bad rap. It got dubbed the ADHD gene, the bully gene, the brat gene, the drinking gene, the slut gene. Now Knafo was effectively calling it the Bamba-sharing gene.

This apparently paradoxical result lies at the heart of one of the most intriguing and influential new hypotheses in behavioral science. It’s known as the plasticity hypothesis, among other terms. It offers to amend but fundamentally transform the genetic paradigm that has dominated psychiatry and much of behavioral science for the past 20 years — the diathesis-stress or risk-gene. This long-dominant risk-gene hypothesis, generated first in the mid-1990s, asserts that certain heavily studied gene variants, most of which affect neurochemistry, create higher risk of mood or behavior problems in people who weather rough childhoods. By offering an explanation of why some people are more vulnerable to life’s troubles than others, the risk-gene hypothesis became one of the most influential ideas in behavioral science and a prime model of how genes interact with environment to affect mood or behavior.

This new hypothesis, however, the plasticity hypothesis, acknowledges those genes magnify vulnerability in people with rough starts — but adds that they also create greater strength and happiness in people who don’t suffer troubled childhoods. The evidence for this resides not only in studies like Knafo’s, which explicitly test for both good and bad effects of these genes, but in many of the older studies that established the risk-gene model. The so-called risk genes, in short, don’t just create risk or vulnerability; they make you more attuned and reactive to your environment, whether bad or good.

“These genes aren’t about risk,” says Jay Belsky,  a University of California, Davis, psychologist who helped conceive and establish the plasticity-gene hypothesis. “It’s about a greater sensitivity to experience. If things go well for you when you’re young, the same genes that could have helped make a mess of you help to make you stronger and happier instead. It’s not vulnerability but responsiveness — for better or worse.”

As the story describes, this orchid hypothesis has been rapidly gaining ground the last couple years, spreading through developmental and clinical psychology both and making its way into the vernacular. It’s also more or less latent in books such as Nassir Ghaemi’s fascinating A First-Rate Madness, which looks at how leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill seemed to benefit from their depression, and articles such Annie Murphy Paul’s “The Upside of Dyslexia,” which appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times. Even as it expands, however, the hypothesis faces challenges from geneticists who question single-gene explanations of complex behavior or, in some cases, any genetic explanation at this early stage of genetic knowledge. This is a rollicking, rich, eternal conflict I’ll deal with more in the book. In the meantime, Jay Belsky, one of the key developers of the orchid hypothesis, ran a simple study in which he looked to see whether having multiple purported ‘sensitivity’ or ‘orchid’ genes would render people more sensitive to their environment than people with fewer such variants:

Late in 2010 he and Kevin Beaver, of Florida State University, published an analysis drawn from a 12-year study of 1,586 American adolescents.

They used genotype data on five of the children’s genes (MAOA, SERT, DRD4, and two other dopamine-processing genes) and data collected several times during the subjects‘ adolescence and early adulthood: ratings of the mothers‘ engagement in their children’s lives, as established through questionnaires of both children and the mothers; and the youths’ “self-regulation” abilities, as rated through parent and child reports about planning and control of emotion, attention, and behavior.

When Belsky and Beaver crunched the numbers, they were surprised to find no significant effects on the study’s 832 girls. “We’ve no idea why,” says Belsky. “Maybe girls just self-regulate better than boys. Maybe they’re less sensitive to maternal engagement at those ages. But these are only wild guesses.”

The 754 boys did react, however; those with more than one plasticity variant showed distinct additive effects. Those with just one variant reacted about the same to maternal involvement as did the boys with no variants, which is to say they reacted very little: These boys fared about the same regardless of how much their mothers were engaged — a true dandelion effect.

Boys with two or more plasticity variants, however, showed a steeply sloped sensitivity, with each additional variant driving self-regulation scores sharply lower in boys with distant mothers and sharply higher in boys with more engaged moms. The more plasticity variants these boys carried, the bigger the difference mothering made.

This is just one study. But the additive effect it found seems to argue well for the orchid hypothesis. And the absence of significant effect in boys with just one plasticity variant suggests an answer to one of the biggest doubts that has haunted behavioral candidate-gene studies. … [T]he additive effect that Belsky found in his multi-gene paper suggests an additional reason that some studies of individual risk or plasticity genes might show negative results: The effect of any one plasticity gene might depend on whether a person also carries a second. This idea also fits well the widely held principle that most complex traits rise from complex multigenic interactions.

This hints at what draws me to this story: not just an intriguing idea, but also the tension between the parsimonious and the expansive: between limiting scientific explanation only to what it can without any doubt account for and pushing it toward the limits of what it can explain.

This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. The rest is in my hard drive, my soft brain, and the ongoing work of the researchers I’m following. Stay tuned.

Orchid children: How bad-news genes came good – 01 February 2012 – New Scientist

The Science of Success aka The Orchid Children – The Atlantic

Image: Dandelion Clock by crows_wood, on Flickr

I thought I’d heard enough about Tiger Moms, but perked up when I came across Tiger Moms and Orchid Kids, by Sam Gridley. Gridley considers how presumably harsh Tiger Mom parenting might generate success and happiness even in highly sensitive kids, the kind you’d think such treatment would crush. What kind of parenting are we talking about?  Annie Murphy Paul, author of Origins, describes the Tiger Mom approach in her Time story about Tiger Mom phenom Amy Chua:

It was the “Little White Donkey” incident that pushed many readers over the edge. That’s the name of the piano tune that Amy Chua, Yale law professor and self-described “tiger mother,” forced her 7-year-old daughter Lulu to practice for hours on end — “right through dinner into the night,” with no breaks for water or even the bathroom, until at last Lulu learned to play the piece.

For other readers, it was Chua calling her older daughter Sophia “garbage” after the girl behaved disrespectfully — the same thing Chua had been called as a child by her strict Chinese father.

And, oh, yes, for some readers it was the card that young Lulu made for her mother’s birthday. “I don’t want this,” Chua announced, adding that she expected to receive a drawing that Lulu had “put some thought and effort into.” Throwing the card back at her daughter, she told her, “I deserve better than this. So I reject this.”

In the conventional view of sensitive children, such treatment should crush them. Some consider Chua’s parenting to border on child abuse. Some think she should be arrested. Yet as Gridley notes, the sort of bidirectional sensitivity that I wrote about in Orchid Children— a heightened responsiveness not just to bad experiences but good, so that so-called risk traits (and genes) can be assets — might allow a sensitive child to respond to any substantial warm notes or overtones amid all this tigerish growling. The key is the nature of that sensitivity, which seems to rise at least partly from certain genes that psychiatry has generally characterized as risk genes, such as short variant(s) of the serotonin transporter gene, or SERT. Here’s Gridley quoting from and commenting on my Atlantic article describing the orchid hypothesis:

“Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.”

This point leads to a metaphor distinguishing two types of children: the “dandelions” who do pretty well regardless of circumstances, and the “orchid” children “who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.” The startling idea here is that the SAME genes that make us vulnerable to neurosis or psychosis also make it possible to achieve great success.…

So what does this mean for tiger mothers versus liberal, child-centered, nicey-nicey Dr. Spock mothers? Amy Chua, whose memoir and Wall Street Journal article set off the controversy, has raised high-achieving children by, she tells us, not settling for less. Screaming at the kids, insulting them, threatening, forcing them do what they hate (practice the violin, for instance)–all of these techniques are within bounds for Chua. Should we conclude that, if her daughters have “orchid”-type genes, their overstressed, abusive childhood will eventually make them socially or emotionally disturbed?.

Maybe not. In his works on education, Parker Palmer emphasizes that various instructional “techniques” may work, but the sine qua non is “teaching with heart and soul,” connecting with your students and also with your own spiritual self. A key to Chua’s approach, if we can believe her, is that she does in fact connect with her kids; they never doubt how much she cares about them. Contrast this with a tolerant, permissive, but emotionally distant parent—which type is more traumatic for the child?

I suspect that the unengaged type, the skittish kitty mom who’s too distracted to pay attention, or the tomcat dad who’s never home, is far more dangerous to youthful psyches than a tiger parent.

And—to return from felines to plants—if the characteristic of orchid children is their sensitiveness to different conditions, we might also suppose that they are (a) highly variable among themselves and (b) attuned to small variations in the environment. What looks on the surface like a harrowing childhood to you or me may not be so damaging to some orchid kids who thrive on tiny but well-placed raindrops of affection.

Gridley is suggesting that enough warmth amid a seemingly harsh environment — some love from a really tough parent — can render that environment nurturing. He has a real point. Environments are complicated, as are people.  And both the literature and the particular case of the most famous tiger mom, Amy Chua, suggest that sensitive people can find nurturance in touch circumstances.

In the scientific literature, for instance, a lovely and ingenious 2004 study from Joan Kaufman and colleagues (pdf) found that even for the most genetically “vulnerable” kids in badly abusive homes (that is, kids with the so-called risk (short) version of the SERT gene), a single high-value relationship with an adult outside the family made them less prone to mental illness than nonsensitive kids from normal homes. (It’s a fascinating study; I wrote about it in more detail here.) It’s as if these kids did exactly what Gridley suggests: They spotted where the help was and focused on it.

Amy Chua’s own described experience offers a more granular example. Amid what would strike many Americans as overly harsh parenting from her Chinese parents, Chua (who as a Chinese American runs about an 80 percent chance of carrying the risky SERT variant) found an emotional mooring in the known love of her parents. Their discipline was strict, but she recognized that it was delivered from love and a desire to prepare them for tough world. This recognition provided a context into which she could receive the apparent harshness as nurturing.

Will it work that way for her kids? Seems early (and presumptuous) to say. The Chua girls are only now nearing adulthood, and while it seems a bit intrusive to even inquire as to their happiness, they apparently volunteer that they’re doing fine, thanks. I’d guess that while the Chua daughters and their mother might have a few things to work out, as every family does, these girls, even though they too probably carry the more sensitive SERT variant, will also carry enough love and support to mend any tiger-claw marks. As the Kaufman study shows, even seemingly marginal compensations can sometimes make up for truly abusive situations, even among the most sensitive children, and Chua’s parenting style falls fall short of the sort of abuse faced by the kids in the Kaufman study  —‚and offers a lot more good as well.

This isn’t to cue up the nice music and say “Don’t worry, be nasty.” Yet it’s important to remember that a strong enough current of love and nurturance — a core of connection that leaves the child no consistent doubt about whether they’re loved — can offset the usual  lapses and absences and even some episodes of deep trouble, even among the most sensitive people — to say nothing of strict but loving parenting.

What parent doesn’t worry about these things? What parent doesn’t sometimes feel she or he is failing? None of us behave always as we would have ourselves behave. Everyone unravels at some point and finds themselves yelling at the kids or feeling too overwhelmed to Show the Love. It’s the mix that matters — or not even the mix but the main ingredient, the central thing that makes up the essence of the meal, even if sometimes the seasonings make it taste bitter.

Related:

The Science of Success (aka Orchid Children) – The Atlantic

The depression map: genes, culture, serotonin, and a side of …

The Bright Side of the “Depression-Risk Gene”

I’m not vulnerable, just especially plastic

Radio hour – More orchidity, this time on New Hampshire Public Radio

Coming sort of soon to a bookstore near you: “The Orchid and the …

How I Wrote “The Orchid Children“

Are “orchid kids” the same as “gifted children”?

Does depression have an upside? It’s complicated

and some others

From the abstract:

Here, we review recent findings that humans and nonhuman primates carrying the s variant of the 5-HTTLPR outperform subjects carrying the long allele in an array of cognitive tasks and show increased social conformity. In addition, studies in 5-HTT knockout rodents are included that provide complementary insights in the beneficial effects of the 5-HTTLPR s-allele. We postulate that hypervigilance, mediated by hyperactivity in corticolimbic structures, may be the common denominator in the anxiety-related traits and (social) cognitive superiority of s-allele carriers and that environmental conditions determine whether a response will turn out to be negative (emotional) or positive (cognitive, in conformity with the social group). Taken together, these findings urge for a conceptual change in the current deficit-oriented connotation of the 5-HTTLPR variants. In fact, these factors may counterbalance or completely offset the negative consequences of the anxiety-related traits. This notion may not only explain the modest effect size of the 5-HTTLPR and inconsistent reports but may also lead to a more refined appreciation of allelic variation in 5-HTT function.

Faithful readers will recognize this as an idea I explored in my Atlantic feature last year, The Orchid Children: that certain ‘risk’ genes, among them the s-allele version of this serotonin transporter gene, create not just risk but a higher overall sensitivity that can create upsides. Many papers have provided data supporting this view. But other than reviews from psychologist Jay Belsky, who was one of the first to assert this notion, few scientists have articulated this idea as boldly and plainly as Judith Homberg and Karl-Peter Lesch do here. That Lesch  first discovered the stress-reactivity created by the s-allele back in 1995 — opening the door to the ‘depression-risk-gene’ view of the s-allele — only heightens the impact of this call to see this ‘depression gene’ differently.

Call it the sensitivity gene, perhaps — or the orchid gene, as I called it in my article.

So what are some of the advantageous traits the s-allele can create? Its benefits (and downsides), Homberg and Lesch assert, rise from “hypervigilance.” By this they essentially mean an increased attention to social dynamics around them.

Physiologically, this shows in an especially reactive amygdala — a couple of deep-brain, almond-sized nuggets  central to fear learning. The amygdala of S-allele carriers show more reaction to things like fearful faces, negative language, and other signs of threat. Yet as Homberg and Lesch point out, the amygdala plays a key role in a wide range of learning, both positive and negative, including (and perhaps especially) in social realms. The amygdala’s extra sensitivity in S-allele carriers may make them more attuned to social dynamics — improving their social cognition, say Homberg and Lesch, and some forms of non-social cognition as well.

These would-be depressives, for instance, do better in a particular “affective” type of go/no-go task, in which you have to stifle an intentional motor response based on the emotional valence of words; this presumably, because S-allele carriers better sense the emotional temperature of language. (Emotionally alert readers, take note — or had you already?)

S-allele carriers (S-S or S-L) have also done better than the more common L-allele carriers (L-L) in some gambling-based decision-making studies. In general they seem more sensitive to context. Rhesus macaques with an S-allele version of the same gene also show stronger cognition in a roughly similar array of tests. Finally, people with S alleles tend to have better episodic memory — memories of things that happened, rather than straight facts — than L-carriers do.

On the cognitive downside, S-allele people aren’t as good as L-allele carriers at remembering a noun if it occurs soon before another noun that is emotionally laden — as if the more charged noun made them forget its predecessor. They also don’t do as well as the infamous Iowa gambling task — possibly because that cognitive game has few emotional cues. There are quite a few cognitive tests in which the variant seems to have no effect.

Add it up, say Lomberg and Lesch, and you have a gene variant that, rather than just Creating depression risk, creates social sensitivity, increased attentiveness, and a “wide range of cognitive functions” that include improved decisions making and cognitive flexibility in many situations. This may provide an evolutionary advantage, since it seems to make people more sensitive to changes in environments and threats of different sorts. “They’re the ones,” as one researchers told me not long ago, “who, back in evolutionary time, would be the first to notice the strangers on the horizon.”

This happens to reach me as I fly to San Diego to attend the first meeting of the Society for Social Neuroscience and then the Society for Neuroscience meeting. I suspect this will be a major topic of discussion.

PS: Forgive the sparse linkage; the slow internet on this plane makes it rather difficult. I’ll try to make up for it later.

Thanks, H.M., for the link at 30,000 feet.

The site, produced by science journalists Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann,

is a craft-focused site for science journalists. Science journalism is changing, but the ability to recognize and sharpen important ideas, ask incisive questions about complex subjects, and tell accurate, compelling stories—often on shorter deadlines and with fewer reporting and editorial resources than ever before—is all the more important to serious science journalists’ success. Our goal is to promote outstanding craftsmanship.

To do so they’re running interviews with writers about how they came across, pitched, sold, and reported and wrote stories. They toss in extra material such as pitch letters, rough drafts as well. The launch issue includes interviews with Robert Krok about her article about an asteroid heading toward Earth and Dan Ferber on his story on a couple wrestling with the farm next door. There are more to come this week and afterwards. This looks like an intriguing site for anyone interested in writing or the different approaches writers take to finding, selling, developing, and writing stories.

Below is a bit from my interview with Carpenter. One thing I’d like to change: I see that I said that researchers in this field are innately “flashy.” I’m not sure if Carpenter misheard me or I just misspoke. I suspect the latter. But I don’t know why I said such a thing. These people are interesting, to be sure. But flashy? T’ain’t in it.I must have been in a geek fever or something. The things that come out of our mouths.

Below are excerpts from mine. Get the whole thing, and the others, at The Open Notebook

The Orchid Children (published online as “The Science of Success”)

By David Dobbs (Atlantic, December 2009)

In a story selected for The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2010, David Dobbs explores the “orchid hypothesis”: the tantalizing idea that certain variants of some behavioral genes can either increase children’s risk for psychiatric and behavioral problems or enable them to flourish spectacularly. Moving from ornery toddlers to a troop of rebellious monkeys to a reckoning with his own DNA, Dobbs reveals how—depending on environment—an accident of genetics can be either a “trap door” to failure or a “springboard” to success.

Where did you first learn about what you term the “orchid hypothesis”?

While I was at a scientific meeting working on a story about adolescence, I went to a talk on gene-by-environment interactions in toddlers by Ariel Knafo, a psychologist at Hebrew University. It was absolutely fascinating. His results showed that kids who had one version of this dopamine-processing gene, and who also had harsh parenting, got less and less sociable and agreeable over time. The opposite was true for kids with the same gene variant but who had warm parenting. Then at the same meeting, I saw another talk by [NIH’s] Stephen Suomi, which showed the same basic dynamic in rhesus monkeys.

What made you think this research would make a good story?

There was very excited talk in the halls about this research, and it was immediately apparent that this idea—that genes thought to make us more sensitive to bad environment actually make us more sensitive to all environments—was hugely important for how you view genetics and human behavior. I could tell it wasn’t just the people at the center of the research who were interested in this because there was such a diverse group of people, all in a gaggle, talking about Knafo’s talk. It was obviously something that’s drawing wide interest. I did quite a few interviews at that meeting, with people testing or pushing the idea and with people who were hearing of it the first time.

[snip]

What were your first steps in developing the idea?

Well my first step was talking to a lot of people at the conference—to take advantage of an opportunity to talk to so many in the field. I wanted to see what people thought, and to bullshit-filter the idea. When I got home, I read a bunch of the literature—a couple dozen papers, I would guess, to start with. Then called a few people I know who aren’t in that direct line of work but who were knowledgeable about the idea. I was looking for a reasonable evidence base under this idea, which there was, and the reactions of good, smart scientists to it. The people I talked to acknowledged that this thing has legs. Some offered caveats and things to watch for as well, which was quite useful when I turned to writing the pitch. If it had a thin evidence base or seemed theoretically flimsy, I would have set it aside.

[snip]

How did you think about the story’s structure?

There were certain elements that I was pretty sure I wanted and some that I got lucky with. For instance, I wasn’t sure what I would do with all this material I had on Suomi’s research, but then while I was working on the story, this amazing monkey coup happened, where one group of monkeys ousted the top group of monkeys, killing a few of them. It was one of those things that, when it happened, I realized this is great for the story. It was quite dramatic. It illustrated some vital things about the ideas in play. And it drew some new thoughts from Suomi. I met with Suomi about two weeks later, and you could see in his face, and hear in the timbre of his voice,  how big a deal it was. It seemed to affect him emotionally as well. Which it would. He follows these monkeys for years, and suddenly they’re killing each other.

There’s a fairly robust literature growing to support the orchid hypothesis. Yet I noticed that in the piece, you really only described in detail the research of a few teams. How did you decide whose research to highlight and whose to gloss over?

Some of that is almost arbitrary. For example, I had three candidates to lead off with. I opened with the work focusing on early childhood because it makes the dynamics easier to understand, and because it included an observation of actual behavior, which brought the whole idea to life. It was also the only controlled experiment that imposed a specific change of environment and watched what happened. Finally, it was possible—though quite difficult—to describe in about 400 words, which is about how much space I had allocated for that part.

Your decision to undergo DNA analysis yourself, and the results of that analysis, make for a lovely and thought-provoking ending. Did you plan to do that from the beginning of your involvement in the story?

I did not plan on it; that’s not the kind of thing I usually do in my stories. Part of the reason I started to think about doing it was sort of the idea that I should put my money where my mouth was—to ask myself, does this really give me that sense of a greater range rather than a steeper slope?

I mentioned to my editor that I was thinking of doing that, and he thought that that would add a lot, but left it to my comfort level. In the first draft, I had it all up at the front of the story. It was his idea to break it in half. This was not the assigning editor, who was Don Peck, but a former staffer named Toby Lester, who sometimes edits features for them. He was an enormous pleasure to work with, and crucial to moving such a complex story from conception to submission in just a couple months.

How long did you spend on the story?

I worked on it full time for about seven to eight weeks, 50-plus hours a week. Maybe roughly four to five weeks of that was research, three to four weeks flat-out writing. Then I spent a week doing revisions after editing.

Why such a short time frame?

The magazine had a hole they wanted to fill, and that’s a very good situation to be in because there’s a sense of urgency about the story, and it gives you an opportunity to help them out of a jam. That can only raise your currency. It’s a good first impression to make. So it met some of my purposes even though it destroyed my summer.

This article spawned a book project for you. How did that process unfold?

I was thinking book from the very beginning, actually—from the first day I ran into the idea at the conference.  After I finished the story in August, I went to New York, interviewed four agents, and chose one—a wonderful young agent named Eric Lupfer. We had about three weeks till the article would come out. We quickly settled on a structure for the book and the proposal, and in about ten days of back-and-forth, we drafted a 10-page proposal. This was hard but fun, and easier than it usually is because we had the article to present as the writing sample for the book. The proposal part just had to describe the book and give an outline.

Incredibly, everything went just as hoped: Eric sent the proposal out the week before the article was printed, with an advance copy attached, and the week the article appeared, generating a lot of buzz, we met with seven different publishers. Several bid, and in the end I signed with Amanda Cook at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, whom I’d already met and liked and who came highly recommended.

You know that Samuel Johnson line about “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”? As I’m packing to move there for a year or two, I was pleased to find, at the splendid site “Samuel Johnson Soundbites,” that it bears even more fully on my own move when given in context:

Boswell and Johnson were discussing whether or not Boswell’s affection for London would wear thin should he choose to live there, as opposed to the zest he felt on his occasional visits. (Boswell lived in Scotland, and visited only periodically. Some people are surprised to learn that Boswell and Johnson were far from inseparable over the last twenty years of Johnson’s life, the period Boswell knew him.)

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”— Samuel Johnson

These are my reasons too: To live in a place richer in intellectual engagement than bucolic Vermont, but novel, and comfortably foreign, in a way that the big cities of the US are not. More proximately, I’m moving to the UK to follow closely some research being done there and nearby for The Orchid and the Dandelion, my book expanding on my Atlantic article “The Orchid Children.”

I’m also attracted by the vibrant science writing and blogging community in London. Along with mixing with Connie St. Louis and other faculty and students at City University London‘s graduate science journalism program, which has been nice enough to make me a senior visiting fellow, I look forward to talking about science writing and blogging both (semi?) formally, at conferences such as ScienceOnline London 2010, and informally at science and science-writer meetups, tweetups, talkfests, and pub crawls. Through Twitter and in-person I’ve already met quite a few writers there and found wonderfully friendly reception from such as Ed Yong, Alice Bell, Nat Geo > Nature transplant Tim Appenzeller, Martin Robbins, Alok Jha, and others. Twitter is an amazing connector.

So we’re off to London to visit the Queen. We’ll be there a year or two. I’ll continue to write for US publications, as well as some in the UK. I’ll be in the US quite a bit meantime, attending conferences (Natl Assn of Science Writers, Society for Neuroethics, Society for Neuroscience, and others), tracking research, and giving an occasional talk.

As to blogging plans: I’ll continue, though likely at a different venue. as will More on that later. In any case, my posts over the next few weeks may be light, or lean towards reposts, as I finish off some things here (stories, packing) and get my family and myself properly situated in London, where we’ve been lucky to find a nice spot to live up near Hampstead Heath, where if need be I can try Oliver Sacks’ cure for writers’ block: a swim in that splendid park’s pond. Apparently Ray Davies sings in one of the church choirs nearby; enough reason to move right there.

And you can always find me here: web | articles | books | blog | twitter

See you soon.