The Science Essay

The essay is a genre-buster. Nonfiction genres—article, book review, memoir, news report—form a kind of taxonomy, like that a biologist imposes on the animal kingdom, or an astronomer on celestial objects. Yet the essay is a genre that subverts the idea of genre. It's not news. It bears a personal stamp, demanding something of the writer's insights, experiences, or idiosyncratic take. But once past these slim criteria, to call it “essay” says precious little about it. The science essay can be formal, even stately, as in Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy's long, sustained argument on climate change, originally presented as a lecture. It can be amusing, as in Alan Lightman's reminiscence of how a failed college electronics project made him, a budding physicist, an ex-experimentalist. It can suffocate with language, as in Richard Selzer's sense-rich explorations of anatomy in “Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery” (1976). . . . I sing of skin, layered fine as baklava, whose colors shame the dawn, at once the scabbard upon which is writ our only signature, and the instrument by which we are thrilled, protected, and kept constant in our natural place. . . . It can deal with life and death, the cosmos and infinity. Or it can be a slight thing, as in an elegy for the slide rule that I wrote around the time the pocket calculator was supplanting it: . . . Long nights spent working physics and chemistry problems would reveal each rule's mechanical idiosyncrasies, the points in its travel where the slide slipped smoothly and those where it snagged. No two rules were alike. Borrow a friend's—same brand, same model, perhaps purchased minutes apart at the student bookstore—and you'd feel vaguely ill at ease. It wasn't yours: The rough spots were different. . . . The science essay can be spartan and simple. Or it can delightfully digress, as Stephen Jay Gould's so often did. “To the undiscerning eye,” Gould wrote once, barnacles are “as boring as rivets.” . . . This is largely attributable to the erroneous impression that they don't go anywhere and don't do anything, ever. The truth of the matter is that they don't go anywhere and don't do anything merely sometimes—and that, other times, barnacle life is punctuated with adventurous travel, phantasmagorical transformations, valiant struggles, fateful decisions, and eating. . . .