In the second Patrusky Lecture at CASW's New Horizons in Science, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson traced the sweep of knowledge about the human family tree, insisting that human survival may depend on understanding the journey that brought Homo sapiens into existence.

The lecture, called "The Human Evolutionary Journey" and given on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Johanson's discovery of the fossil hominid Lucy, traced the discoveries that have extended the human family back more than 6 million years. Among these is a recent finding of an Ardipithecus fossil with a divergent great toe in Ethiopia near the Lucy site (photo, left)—one of many finds that may shed light on the paths early hominids took to walking upright.

Many species of the genus Homo are now known to have evolved from prehuman species in Africa, Johanson noted, and current work is filling in gaps to explain how modern humans developed their characteristic cognitive complexity, linguistic flexibility and capacity for culture and cooperation.

Johanson (@drdonjohanson, #Lucy40) spoke on Oct. 19, 2014 as part of the 52nd New Horizons in Science briefings in Columbus, Ohio. CASW President Alan Boyle (above right, with Johanson) presented a crystal sculpture and certificate commemorating the lecture. The speaker was surrounded by writers with questions after the talk.

New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal, a physician and newspaper correspondent for 20 years, is the recipient of the 2014 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting.

Rosenthal was cited for her exemplary coverage of health care economics and pricing in the United States and her groundbreaking, ongoing Times series, “Paying Till It Hurts.” The Cohn Award judges lauded “her ability to translate and humanize the nation’s mind-numbingly complex health care system and the extraordinary personal, financial and public health toll of the country’s $2.8 trillion annual bill.”

Rosenthal, they wrote, “not only investigates and documents the often exorbitant price tags of common medical procedures and treatments—from colonoscopies to childbirth—but also produces sublimely accessible multimedia stories that touch and matter greatly to patients, health care professionals and policy makers.”

Marking its 15th year, the Victor Cohn Prize is given for a body of work published or broadcast within the last five years. The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW), a not-for-profit organization of journalists and scientists committed to improving the quality of science news and information reaching the public, administers and bestows the Prize.

Rosenthal received a $3,000 award and certificate at a ceremony in Columbus, Ohio on Saturday, October 18, during ScienceWriters2014, a meeting jointly organized by CASW and the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). She is shown below accepting the award certificate from CASW President Alan Boyle.

“Everybody knows the top line: health care is extraordinarily expensive in this country. Rosenthal breaks fresh ground in explaining why we have the costly system we have,” said the judges. They were particularly impressed by Rosenthal’s “epic reportorial skills and enterprising approach, combining dogged field reporting, medical database mining, and digital crowd-sourcing to find patients with compelling tales of their own experiences with the out-of-control American health care system.“

Launched in 2013, Rosenthal’s series to date has included eight major installments as well as more than a dozen related follow-up articles, interactive graphics, videos, photographs and reader comments in a digital presentation that “attracted tens of thousands of comments, the most for a series in the New York Times history,” according to the paper’s assistant managing editor, Rebecca Corbett.

“Rosenthal pioneered the use of new forms of reader engagement, developing directed discussion questions, a Facebook group and even online quizzes like ‘Is this a Hospital or a Hotel?’ urging Americans to reflect on and share their experiences with a high-priced medical system. And their comments were collected into a database that became an invaluable reporting tool,” noted Corbett.

In her nomination letter, Corbett praised the series for telling “the surprising back stories of America’s inflated medical bills—the highest in the world, though the outcomes are often worse than in other developed countries.” She said Rosenthal’s stories “were filled with eye-popping examples of how providers extract profits in a health care market where pricing is largely unregulated, and where neither doctors nor patients typically know prices in advance.”

The series had tremendous impact on multiple fronts, noted Corbett: It was featured on television and radio and “cited in newspaper editorials, medical journals, judicial opinions and legislative debates as offering the clearest dissection to date of the health system’s pricing ills.”

Elisabeth Rosenthal

Elisabeth Rosenthal began her Times career in 1994 as a reporter in the science department, and went on to cover the health and hospitals beat on the metro desk. In 1997, she began a six-year stint as the paper’s Beijing correspondent, reporting on everything from politics to the HIV/AIDS and SARS epidemics, and winning numerous awards for her coverage. Rosenthal later became the European health and environment correspondent, based in the Rome bureau. In 2008, she returned to the U.S. as a New York-based Times senior writer and international environment correspondent.

Rosenthal went back to health care writing after being asked to cover the Affordable Care Act during the 2012 election campaign. “I instead proposed an investigative series designed to illustrate for our readers why ordinary medical encounters in the United States end up costing so much.”  In a February 11, 2013, post on the Times’ health blog “Well,” she sought patient stories from readers who had had hip replacements or other procedures. A rapid outpouring of responses helped launch her series, which was enriched by her own medical expertise and overseas experience.

Rosenthal has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, a Ferris Visiting Professor at Princeton and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. She holds B.S. (biology) and B.A. (history) degrees with high honors from Stanford University and an M.A. in English literature from Cambridge University, where she was a Marshall scholar. Rosenthal earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, training in internal medicine and working briefly as an emergency medicine physician before turning to journalism full-time.

This year’s entries were judged by Ben Patrusky, CASW’s executive director emeritus; Joann Rodgers, a freelance writer and author, and faculty scholar at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics; CASW immediate past president Cristine Russell, a freelance writer and senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; and NASW president Ron Winslow, a Wall Street Journal medical reporter.

The Victor Cohn Prize

The inaugural Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting in 2000 was shared by Laurie Garrett of Newsday and Lawrence K. Altman of The New York Times. Subsequent recipients were Jon Palfreman, a public television documentarian; Shannon Brownlee, a noted magazine writer and book author; Michelle Trudeau of National Public Radio; Rick Weiss of the Washington Post; Jerome Groopman of The New Yorker; Geeta Anand of The Wall Street Journal; Joe Palca of NPR; Denise Grady of The New York Times; Marilynn Marchionne of the Associated Press; Ron Winslow, of The Wall Street Journal; and Jon Cohen of Science Magazine. John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and freelance health reporter and former NPR correspondent Joanne Silberner shared the 2013 prize.

The award honors the late Washington Post medical writer and health columnist Victor Cohn, known as the dean of medical science reporting. He distinguished himself by the clarity and effectiveness of his reporting during a 50-year career that began with outstanding coverage of early “wonder” drugs and the polio vaccine, as well as the dawn of the modern space age. Late in his career, Cohn started a Post column called “The Patient’s Advocate” and wrote a highly regarded professional book, News & Numbers: A Guide to Reporting Statistical Claims and Controversies in Health and Other Fields. Cohn, who died of cancer in 2000, was a co-founder in 1959 of CASW.

To read Elisabeth Rosenthal’s work (twitter: @nytrosenthal), visit the New York Times website.

Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson of Arizona State University has been chosen by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW) to deliver the Patrusky Lecture on October 19, 2014, at New Horizons in Science, CASW’s annual briefing on emerging research and issues in science.

Johanson will examine current progress in the search for human origins in a presentation celebrating the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the fossil hominid known as Lucy. The find marked a watershed moment in the study of hominid evolution. Johanson, founding director of the Institute of Human Origins, is best known for Lucy’s discovery and the subsequent analysis, which changed scientists’ view of how prehuman hominids came to walk upright. He has spent his career discovering clues to human origins through uncovering and analyzing fossil evidence from Africa.

Titled "The Human Evolutionary Journey," the second Patrusky Lecture will be given in Columbus, Ohio. Johanson’s audience will be science writers gathered for ScienceWriters2014, a conference that combines the New Horizons science presentations, hosted this year by Ohio State University, with professional workshops organized by the National Association of Science Writers.

The Patrusky Lecture was established last year by the CASW Board of Directors in honor of CASW Executive Director Emeritus Ben Patrusky, who managed the New Horizons program for 30 years and served as the organization’s executive director for 25 years. The inaugural lecture was given in November 2013 by celebrated chemist and materials scientist George M. Whitesides of Harvard University.

“Dr. Johanson's selection continues our effort to make the Patrusky Lecture a star-turn event each year at New Horizons,” said CASW President Alan Boyle, who is also science editor for NBC News Digital. “And the timing couldn’t be better—not only because of the 40th anniversary, but also because of the new horizons that are opening up in the study of human origins. There are few researchers as well placed to tell us about the past as well as the future of the field.”

About Don Johanson

Determined to be a scientist from childhood, Don Johanson earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. In 1974, he had just received his doctorate and joined Case Western Reserve University as a junior faculty member when he and colleagues mounted a search for hominid fossils at Hadar, located in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia. On that trip, Johanson found the partial skeleton that changed the conventional account of human evolution, which had been developed based on much more fragmentary fossils.

Returning the following year, Johanson and colleagues found the remains of at least 13 individuals at the Afar site in Hadar. Johanson called these the First Family and argued that they were of a single, new species, Australopithecus afarensis. Lucy and the First Family fossils have been estimated to be 3.18 million years old.

Johanson analyzed the fossils at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where he was appointed curator of physical anthropology in 1975. He developed a laboratory there that attracted scholars from all over the world. In 1981, he founded the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, Calif., to conduct field and analytical research on the early human fossil record. IHO moved to Arizona State in 1997. Johanson turned over the directorship to William Kimbel in 2009.

Before the discovery of Lucy, the dominant theory was that early humans developed big brains, became capable of making tools, and then began walking upright to free up their hands. Lucy and the other hominids whose remains were found at the site were walking upright, but had small brains and showed no evidence of using tools. A different theory for the evolution of bipedalism was needed.

The discovery of hundreds of other fossils at Hadar bolstered the view that A. afarensis was a distinct species that is widely thought to be the common ancestor to subsequent species of both Australopithecus and Homo. In addition, a great deal has been learned about prehuman evolution from the study of the Hadar fossils, and A. afarensis has become the benchmark by which other ancient hominid species are evaluated. Johanson has used the Lucy story extensively to excite and inform the public about human origins research. He has authored or co-authored several books, including Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (1991); Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins (1994); From Lucy to Language (2006); and Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins (2010). His Webby-winning website www.becominghuman.org is used worldwide as a powerful learning tool for students from elementary school through the university level.

Since 1980, Johanson has participated in the production of documentaries and online resources on human evolution. He appeared as the narrator and on-screen host of an Emmy-nominate three-part NOVA series in 1994. He continues to conduct fieldwork and a field school in Hadar and teach at ASU and most recently was featured on the PBS series “Your Inner Fish.” Following a five-year visit to the US as part of a touring exhibit, Lucy is now back at the Ethiopian National Museum in Addis Ababa. Her discovery in 1974 launched multiple research programs in Ethiopia that have resulted in discoveries of human ancestor fossils that stretch back to nearly six million years ago.

Johanson holds the Virginia M. Ullman Chair in Human Origins in ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Recipient of many international prizes and awards, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Siena Academy of Sciences. With support from the National Science Foundation, the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation and the National Geographic Society, he has carried out field research in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Tanzania as well as Ethiopia. 

CASW invites 30-and-under science writers to submit entries for the 2018 Evert/Clark Seth Payne Award, which will recognize outstanding reporting and writing by a young journalist covering any field of science. 

Entries may be submitted online and must be completed by JUNE 30, 2018.

The Clark/Payne Award is intended to encourage young science writers. The 2018 winner will receive $1,000 and expenses to attend ScienceWriters2018 in Washington, DC. The award was established in memory of Ev Clark, a veteran journalist at Business Week, The New York Times and Newsweek, and Seth Payne, his long-time friend and colleague at Business Week and a founder of the award.

The Clark/Payne Award has been presented since 2006 at the meeting of science writers organized jointly by CASW and the National Association of Science Writers. This year's award winner will be recognized during Awards Night on October 13.

This will also be the second year that the award is fully managed and bestowed by CASW. The National Press Foundation, which had managed the Evert Clark Fund, transferred the fund to CASW in April 2017. Former Business Week senior science correspondent John Carey has managed judging and will continue his volunteer involvement.

For submission instructions and more information, see the Clark/Payne Award page.

Four writers who have helped readers discover science in topics from basketball to curly fries have been chosen by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing to receive prestigious Taylor/Blakeslee University Fellowships supporting graduate study in science writing.

Each will receive a $5,000 award for the 2014-15 academic year.

Chosen from among 32 applicants were:

Denny Densford of Lexington, KY (pictured at upper right). Densford studied journalism and psychology at the University of Kentucky, where it can be hard for any news to compete with basketball. “Fink” Densford’s writing in the student newspaper adroitly leveraged sports analogies to pull readers into science stories. He’ll pursue a master’s degree in science communication at Boston University.

Jeanette Kazmierczak of Newnan, GA. While earning her bachelor’s in journalism at the University of Georgia, Kazmierczak has been inspired by internships with WGBH/NOVA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her weekly column for the student paper, “She Blinded Me with Science,” answers such reader questions as “Can your face really get stuck like that?” She will attend the master’s program in specialized journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School.

Joshua Sokol of Baltimore, MD. After graduating from Swarthmore with degrees in astronomy and English literature, Sokol joined the Space Telescope Science Institute as a research and instrument analyst. He conquered a fear of writing when STScI gave him the opportunity to write captions explaining the science behind Hubble Telescope images. He will attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate science writing program.

Annie Tague of Pilot Point, TX. Tague has done extensive fieldwork in environmental conservation, agriculture and public health while following her intellectual curiosity across the sciences. A Haverford English literature graduate, she will also join the MIT program. She hopes through science writing to “infuse daily conversation with discovery.”

CASW’s fellowship award process was accelerated this year so that recipients could be notified ahead of the April 15 decision date for graduate admissions. Going forward, applications will be due each March. The fellowships are underwritten by a grant from the Brinson Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropic organization. They honor the late Rennie Taylor and Alton Blakeslee, science writer and science editor respectively for the Associated Press. More information may be found on this page.

(An earlier version of this announcement appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of ScienceWriters, the magazine of the National Association of Science Writers.)