Clarke Central High School graduate Deborah Blum will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame on Sept. 23 at 6 p.m. The festivities will begin with a discussion on the history of food safety regulations with Blum in conversation with UGA’s Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, who directs the Center for Food Safety.
The author of several nonfiction books, Blum began her career as a journalist at small newspapers before earning a degree in science writing from Wisconsin, winning a Pulitzer prize and directing MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program. Her career hasn’t been linear.
After she created a toxic cloud as a freshman in a college laboratory, Blum wondered if chemistry was the right major. She was attending Florida State University, studying science like her father, a UGA entomologist. When her hair caught fire in a Bunsen burner, she thought, “I can’t do this. I’m a danger to myself.” She left Tallahassee and returned to Athens and UGA, where she majored in journalism.
She had always loved to write, so journalism “just clicked for me,” she says. Her first job was at the Gainesville Times, where she was the police reporter. She moved to the Macon Telegraph and then the St. Petersburg Times. “I always wanted to be a science reporter,” she says, so she applied to graduate school at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After earning her degree in environmental writing at Wisconsin, she joined the staff at the Fresno Bee before moving to the Sacramento Bee.
“I was happy as a clam,” she says. “I was their first science writer, so I got to invent the job.” She knew she had to become the best writer at the paper, to tell a story that would pull people in, so she developed her skills writing in narrative science stories. She wrote about the back story of the HIV epidemic, ozone depletions and nuclear weapons, among other topics. When she was writing about nuclear weapons, a scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory brought her damning classified documents, “and I was so paranoid, I kept moving the documents around to different places.” After her story ran, the federal government shut down the project, a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser designed by physicist Edward Teller.
She moved on to exploring the moral and ethical issues surrounding primate research: “We’re the number one species, and what does it mean in the way we handle our closest relatives?” It took her months to assemble the information on the treatment of the many monkeys and apes coming into California and on the conflict between researchers and animal rights advocates.
Blum filed Freedom of Information requests regularly. She told her colleagues at the Sacramento Bee that she would “win a Pulitzer Prize for aggravation.” Instead, in 1992, she won a Pulitzer for beat reporting for a series that became her first book, The Monkey Wars. It appeared in 1994, the year she delivered her second son.
Three years and one more book—Sex on the Brain—later, Blum and her family moved to Madison, WI, where in 1977 she joined the University of Wisconsin journalism faculty. She designed a science writing class and a narrative writing class, also teaching her students about freelance writing and story pitching. And she continued doing her own work, writing a regular chemistry blog for Wired and articles for other publications. Two more books followed, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection and Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death.
Blum then returned in print to one of her early loves, chemistry. The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York was published in 2011 and was the basis of a PBS American Experience documentary in 2013.
In 2015, Blum became the first female head of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program, which works to promote “vigorous, accurate, and independent coverage of the sciences,” with a much-heralded digital magazine that Blum co-founded, many training and outreach programs, and an award for best local science journalism. Blum wrote her second poison-related book in 2018, The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.
At the end of July, she left the MIT job and moved to North Carolina, where her three sisters live, planning to return to full-time writing. She is finishing her final book related to poison, focusing on the history of female poisoners, including Roberta Elder in Atlanta and Macon’s Anjette Lyles.
WHAT: Georgia Writers Hall of Fame Induction
WHEN: Tuesday, Sept. 23, 6 p.m.
WHERE: UGA Special Collections Library
HOW MUCH: FREE!
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