Science in the Triangle

Robert Krulwich

Painters develop a style - Van Gogh’s brush strokes, Pollock’s abstract drips, Mondrian’s intersecting black lines. Writers find a voice to express themselves. The signature storytelling of Robert Krulwich, NPR’s science correspondent, uses style and voice. He paints with sounds.

As the keynote speaker at ScienceOnline 2011, which from Jan. 13 through Jan. 16 brought together more than 300 science bloggers in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, Krulwich used some of his science videos and radio podcasts, including a Radio Lab recording from 2008, as examples.

The Radio Lab recording explored brain research into how we make choices and, among other people, featured Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neuroscientist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and author of the book “Awakenings.”

In the recording, Sacks talked about the routines he has developed to minimize choices. One involved a weekly trip to the farmer’s market, where he would always buy two pounds of kidneys. One week something went wrong and the vendor misunderstood Sacks. Instead of two pounds, the vendor packed up 22 pounds of kidneys. Too shy to complain, Sacks said, he just took them, paid for them and carried them home.

“I should have thrown away this monstrous, palpitating bag of kidneys,” Sacks said.

“Then followed an increasingly nightmarish period in which I had kidneys for breakfast, for lunch. Kidneys stewed. Sweet kidneys,” he said. “Finally, after about 10 days by which I had eaten about 50, BLUEERRGHH, an incredible nausea and vomiting took hold of me.”

Sacks’ retching sound unequivocally answered the question of how much is too much in a way any kindergartener could understand.

To take the audience along while he discovers how things work is what he aims for, Krulwich said in his keynote talk. The sounds are there to drive home impressions along the journey.

His sound pictures work, they tell a story that you can understand and feel, because Krulwich is inquisitive and an explainer at heart.

“You can’t help yourself,” he said in an interview with Science in the Triangle. “You ask the question that your soul asks.”

This wanting to explain things has gotten him into trouble, as Krulwich acknowledged in the interview. He has been told that it will never make him famous. And it’s hard work. It may look effortless when he breaks down complex topics such as science, technology and economics in a way that his aunt Nancy who got a B- in biology understands. But it isn’t, he said.

Watch the interview with Krulwich:

Watch the science story that he said was the hardest to tell here.

And watch his keynote talk at ScienceOnline2011 here and here and here.