He's a fill-in for someone who couldn't make it, says that he has an unusual job for a reporter, which is to write about ideas.
(How sad that this is unusual ~~)
He's the guy who has to write about things like stem cells that are complex and take actual thought to grok . . . he would not have predicted how much of a public appetite there is for really geeky stories.
He ended up covering stem cells this year because there was one story he was especially interested in. His editors didn't take a lot of convincing to take it on; he's pretty sure that there's a false conception among researchers and scientists that people won't be interested in what they're doing.
The interest in this goes beyond the sexy political debate, though. His experience is that people really do want to understand this, and in the last year he's become convinced that there's nothing he can't learn if the people will just sit down and talk with him. This year he's immersed himself in stem cells ~~ every night when he used to be reading novels he's now reading scientific papers on stem cells.
His message to the scientists here is that the interest in this story is about the science itself . . .we don't have to focus on the fight. The science is fascinating, and we shouldn't be afraid to get that story out in case it makes things more difficult.
He has faith in the intelligence of his readers, and believes that keeping the readers well-informed is the reason journalism exists.
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