What was it like working in the Bayer archives?
A pleasure. I love digging through old papers—the raw material of history. I got to go through all of Domagk’s lab notebooks, page by page—the process of discovery detailed in a series of painstaking experiments. Then I found his unpublished, typewritten memoir in the archive. Corporate archives are underused resources for science historians; Bayer’s is one of the best I’ve been in. How did you get into science writing? Was it always your goal to do book-length projects? I started out studying microbiology and immunology, then stopped short of my Ph.D. when I realized I’d rather write about science than do it. Bench science requires a degree of patience I don’t have. So I studied journalism, then started writing for magazines, doing reporting for some professional journals and writing science pieces for general-circulation magazines. Just making ends meet. Then I was hired as a science trade magazine editor for a business-to-business publisher, and then as an editor at a university. Bo
