Sean B. Carroll in Quanta:
I understand their concern. Perhaps they worry that I have abandoned the rigors of science.
So I try to reassure them. I first tell them that one of the principal characters in the story is a biologist — Jacques Monod, a well-known, Nobel Prize-winning co-founder of the field of molecular biology. Then I explain that Monod resisted the Nazi occupation during World War II, effectively criticized Soviet-style communism, and was friends with Camus. That seems to satisfy most.
But what I really want to tell them is how laboratory science and nonfiction writing have a lot more in common than they might think. Indeed, my experience in science helped to train me for writing. The process of researching a question — of testing hunches and digging for concrete evidence — is similar. And even better, the thrill of discovery is just as gratifying.
A good example unfolded one December morning in Paris in 2011. I made my way to the Prefecture of Police just a few blocks south of Notre Dame Cathedral on the Left Bank. After showing the guard my passport, she pointed me upstairs to their archives. I introduced myself to the receptionist and was offered a seat at a large, wooden table in a small reading room.
What was I, a biologist from Wisconsin, doing at the Paris Police Archives? I was playing a hunch — a hunch that those archives might hold documents that could help me fill a gap in the story I was writing.
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