House-hunting the democratic way - learning from the bees...

When I walked into the lecture hall last week, this image looked like a swarm of bees to me. By the time, I walked out one hour later, this is what I saw.

No, this was not the effect of a dream state or a hallucinogen but rather the effect of Dr. Thomas Seeley’s work.

Tim Seeley, as he is known, is an ethologist and an entomologist from Cornell and probably one of the world’s leading expert in the phenomena of swarm intelligence. He has been studying the behaviors and social structures of bees for many decades now. As far as scientific genealogy goes, Tim has great Pedigree. He began his work on bees, as part of his doctoral dissertation with Lindauer who was a student with Karl Von Frisch, the Nobel laureate who pioneered the field itself. It was Von Frisch’s discovery of the now famous waggle dance in bees, as a tool for communication that gave us our first insights into the social structures of the insect world. Von Frisch found that scout bees would return from a food source and would then dance around the hive; soon after which, the rest of the forager bees would go hunting and collecting.

By careful observation over years, Von Frisch found that the duration, direction and quality of the dance would communicate to the rest of the hive, details about the quality, location and distance of the food source. This opened up a whole new field in biology as animals were long considered to be incapable of communication, coordination, culture and altruism. Instead, Von Frisch’s findings attacked the very foundations of human uniqueness and demonstrated these tiny insects to be capable of all this and much more.

Lindauer, Von Frisch’s student and later colleague, followed up on this work and found that a young bee swarm would also choose its future nest site by a decision making process that was based on reports of the dancing scouts. Seeley was intrigued by the idea of swarm intelligence, by the ability of a swarm as a whole to arrive at a decision that could potentially make or break the future of the colony.

His first forays into this question began with determining what the bees were looking for, when they were scouting the real estate market. Honeybee colonies reproduce by budding, whereby the queen and some workers (a few thousand) leave the nest and bivouac on a branch for a few days depending on their resources. At this point, the swarm needs to locate a new home for themselves that will ensure their survival. By chasing bee swarms and by building potential hive sites of many different shapes and sizes as part of his doctoral work, Tim found that the young swarm was looking for a nesting site that was high, well insulated and yet roomy. It had to be high enough to escape predators (at least 15 ft), big enough (atleast 10 gallons) to rear a new brood and to stock supplies to last through the winter. For a honeybee swarm, choosing a potential home is a momentous decision that might compromise their survival itself. The task of hunting is thus delegated to the most experienced workers who scout nearby locations and report to the swarm. 

Lindauer had already shown that the scouts used the waggle dance to “tell” the rest of the swarm about the new site and that the decision was somehow arrived at by a collective process. Trying to understand the dynamics of the swarm was a challenging and almost impossible task at the time, even for someone like Seeley. In the early decades of the field, ecologists were limited to the use of a simple tool set of notebooks, pens, stopwatches, paint sets, wristwatches and little else. Tracking hundreds of individual scouts, their movements, dances and patterns at the level of multiple swarms was impossibility. Even someone as creative and ingenious as Seeley was forced to wait for technology to catch up with his ideas.

Finally, in the last decade of the twentieth century, as the camera and video recording techniques came of age, Seeley decided that the time was ripe for delving into those forbidden questions. And the answer lay in careful and meticulous observation. Seeley and his students would manually label and mark the thousands of bees in a swarm, but this was only the easy part of the job. They would then video record the entire house-hunting process for a period of 2-3 days and at the end of it, they faced the enormous task of decoding the videos to identify the underlying patterns. The watched the scouts hunt at different locations, coming back to report and then the entire decision making process. Each 16 hour film of the bees’ decision making process would take atleast a month of eye-stinging labour to decipher. What they found was fascinating indeed.

The experienced scout bees would head out and survey the available real estate. They would the, come back and advertise the potential locations and their qualities to their nest mates by performing the waggle dance. The angle of the bees with respect to the sun would indicate the direction of the site, while the duration of the dance would indicate the distance. The quality of the site was indicated by the simple metric of the number of dance repeats that the bee did. The more a scout bee advertised, its location, the stronger the lobby it built. These waggle dances would then recruit additional scouts to the site until a decision was made. Interestingly, each scout bee would only visit one site on most occasions and would only lobby or rather “dance” for it. Each time she returned from the site, the number of dance circuits would progressively decline but each routine would recruit a new wave of scouts, creating multiple, independent reports. 

Seeley and his students began their studies suspecting a consensus building mechanism to be involved – a democracy of sorts. What they instead found was that the scouts themselves don’t pay any attention to the consensus. They decision is made by a quorum, a critical number (20-30) of bees being simultaneously present in the nest site – representing successful reports from many independent scouts. Trying to understand the significance of the number, Seeley and Dr. Kevin Passino, a professor of computer engineering at the Ohio state university, came together and modeled this decision making process. They fund that in a simulation, adjusting the quorum to only 15 bees would result in quick but error prone decisions. Increasing the number to above 20 on the other hand produced slower but only slightly more accurate decisions. It thus seemed that the bees had found the optimum number to balance the cost of resource starvation with expected gain in accuracy. But the precise mechanism underlying this “plebiscite” remained unclear, until of course, Dr. Seeley and his students heard the head butts.

They found that in deciding which site to choose, the scouts would also employ another tactic in addition to the positive-reinforcements achieved by dancing. They also had a stop signal – a booming head butt. When choosing between two nest sites, the scout bees committed to each nest site would direct these head butts to the scouts promoting the other box; thus setting up a cross inhibition between the two populations of scout bees.

The honeybee stop signal is a vibrational signal signal that lasts about 150 ms and has a fundamental frequency around 350 Hz. It is typically delivered, by the sender butting her head against the dancer. Although the dancer may not show an immediate response to the signal, the accumulation of such stop signals is seen to increase the probability that the bee will cease dancing. [Commonly used during foraging, the stop signal is given when a forager bee is attacked in a food source and this reduces the recruitment of colony resources to perilous food sources.]

To further understand the implications of such a cross-inhibitory selection mechanism, Dr. Seeley and his colleagues further modeled the decision making process. Testing individual models of no or indiscriminate stop signals suggested the overwhelming possibility of reaching at an impasse – an impossible deadlock. Such a stable deadlock would result in the swarm never reaching a decision and thus starving to death. Simulations showed that the deadlock persists even when the stop signaling is applied with discretion but below a critical threshold.

When the stop signals are applied above a critical threshold, the swarm is either able to randomly arrive at a consensus for one the two equal alternatives or if the difference in the quality of the two sites is significantly different, then the stop signals ensured a consensus for the superior alternative. The existence of the stop signal and a high enough quorum thus ensure that the bees arrive at an optimal decision most of the times.

Once the search committee has made up its mind and the critical quorum of bees is established at the nest site, the scouts lobbying for the site begin their final “move”. They begin with an auditory signal, called as worker piping, that can actually be heard by us. Coincident with this signal, the other bees in the swarm begin to prepare for flight. Bees fly with wings moving at some 250 times per second and this requires their wing muscles to be warm (35 deg C) and metabolically active. To do this, upon receiving the piping signal, the bees warm up their flight muscles by disengaging their chest muscles from their wings and vibrating them. The temperature of the whole swarm rises up rather steeply in less than half an hour.

 

Worker piping and the pitch of the sound perfectly match the beat frequency of a flying bee and some early experiments suggest a critical link between the two. In the final few minutes before the take off, the workers exhibit another rather strange phenomenon - a so called ritualistic buzz run. Here, the bees run across the entire swarm with outspread wings and a buzzing sound, almost invoking everyone into action.  As the swarm is warm and ready, the buzz run begins and finally the swarm lifts-off. It slowly hovers over its temporary home for a minute or two and then starts proceeding towards the nest at speeds ranging from 0.5 – 5 miles per hour. They finally stop near the goalm their future home scented with the Nasonov pheromones from the scouts. In the absence of these scent markers, the swarm finds its more difficult, not impossible, to locate the entrance to the hive site. At this point, they are then guided by these streaker bees, who repeatedly shoot towards the goal and guides the others. The bees thus finally make it to their new home – and a young hive begins to grow.

Although elegant and simple, this mechanism needs further careful study to account for the individuality and subjectivity of the bees.  If in the early phase of the scouting, a single bee dances more enthusiastically for a bad site or less enthusiastically for a good site, then the balance of signals could tilt very rapidly introducing a lot od stochasticity. In fact, as they individually tracked these bees, Dr. Seeley and his group also noticed many differences between them. They are all not the same like a cookie cutter and are rather quirky. Some are really good dancers, some are not; some are really peppy and get going early in the morning while some others have to be woken up. They have a lot of personality and with the cumulative mechanism of this process, small vulnerabilities at the start could easily run amock and alter the fate of the hive.

It would also be interesting to know if the hive changes its criteria and its choices if they are running out of reserves and how the choices are made? The rate of information arriving to the hive could also bias the processing of the input and the cascade to the decision – say a scout flies closer to the swarm and reports back sooner and builds up a bigger lobby. The reliability of the responses of the individual bees to multiple optimal or suboptimal sites is another interesting question that may be rather revealing. All in all, like all great studies in science, Dr. Seeley’s raises many more interesting questions, even as he finds the answers to them.

Interestingly, as Dr. Seeley and his students were uncovering these details of the house-hunting process of the swarm, there emerged a few parallels that are imperceptible to an otherwise untrained mind. What Seeley saw was an emerging parallel between the bee swarm and the human brain. In a swarm, each scout reported on a single find, much like a neuron responding to a particular stimulus. “Both are cognitive entities shaped by natural selection to be skilled at acquiring and processing information to make decisions,” he says. In both these systems, decision-making is a competition between mutually interacting populations of excitable units – neurons or individuals – that accumulate noisy evidence for alternatives and, when population exceeds a threshold, the corresponding choice is made. A common underlying feature for both bees and neural decision-making is the existence of cross-inhibition. A population that inhibits others proportional to its own activation, thus ensuring that only one of the alternatives is chosen.

And so, as I stepped out of that lecture hall at the end of that hour, my rewired brain could see more to the statement “buzz in the brain” than was ever obvious to me. 

The question is what do you see?

References:

1)   Stop signals provide cross inhibition in collective decision making by honeybee swarms, Seeley et al, Science, January 2012

2)   Swarm intelligence in honeybees: Talk by Dr. Tim Seeley at the University of California, San Diego.

3)   Decoding the language of the bee: Nobel lecture, Dec 12, 1973, Karl Von Frisch.

4)   Swarm Intelligence: How Tom Seeley discovered ways that bee colonies make decisions, Part II, MEA McNeil

5)   How honeybees break a decision-making deadlock, Science, 6 January 2012, By Jeremy E Niven

6)   You tube Lecture by Dr. Tim Seeley

 

The wrongs at the "right" edge of human existence...

How genius is persecuted even as it is ardently desired...

In ancient Rome, genius was the guiding spirit of a person - a 'genie' who would inspire a person to create, produce and bring into being, things of exceptional beauty. From the early days of being associated with spirits, genius soon became an assessment of intelligence and creativity.

Centuries later, philosopher David Hume stated that "a genius is looked at as a person disconnected from the society - someone who works remotely, away from the rest of the world". Although Hume's definition seems rather simplistic, reductionist, and perhaps even wrong, there is a kernel of truth in it. Genius is defined by its separation from the rest of the populace. In other words, in the human spectrum of intelligence, most people lie around and define the average. But the geniuses lie on the right edge of that Gaussian bell shaped distribution - separated from the rest of the world. This distance - separating the genius from the average on the bell curve - also reflects on our social mores, expectations and tolerances, as geniuses are measured upto a different standard altogether.

While most people seek genius, a chosen few are 'blessed' with it. This however, does not diminish the value or exclusivity of it. It's rarity only makes genius more sought after and elusive. Even today, the rest of the us seem to be struggling to understand the genius of Mozart, Picasso, Shakespeare, Beethoven or Einstein. They are revered, honored, envied and studied. And yet they are persecuted in their own way.

Yes. Genius is persecuted by the Society. Not just the Galileos and Aristotles of the world who seek to overthrow and invalidate our view of the world. This persecution is extended to the fondest of our geniuses.

Albert Einstein, a name synonymous with genius, died on 18th April 1955 at the age of 76 from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. His brain - the very mass of cells that had imagined traveling on a beam of light and in the process redefined our view of the universe -  weighed 1230 g. At the time of his death, Einstein wished for a cremation. He wanted to prevent the examination, dismemberment and desecration of his remains. And yet what happened next is a testament to our obsession, fascination and alienation with idea of a genius. Contrary to what was requested, Einstein's eyes were removed by his ophthalmologist and they remain in private hands till today. In fact, even today, they maybe floating in a cookie jar filled with formalin on someone's mantle piece. But what began with the eyes, did not stop there. The examining pathologist, Thomas S. Harvey wanted to study the brain of this genius and proceeded to acquire permission to preserve and study the brain. The permeating rationale being that structural differences may underlie the functional differences in Einstein's brain as he envisioned the space-time fabric and attempted to explain the special and general theories of relativity. 

Although the details behind the rest of the story are murky, it is believed that Harvey obtained permission from Einstein's son, Hans Albert and his executor, Otto Nathan to preserve the brain. And thus, Einstein's brain was removed, weighed, measured, perfused and immersed in the pungent smelling  formalin. Being a pathologist by profession, Harvey also used an Exakta 35 mm camera to take dozens of photographs of the whole and partially dissected brain. He then partitioned the hemispheres into 240 blocks. The cerebellum (our hind brain), the brain stem and the cerebral arteries were also preserved in the hope that may shed additional light on the workings of a genius. The resulting 240 blocks were embedded in celloidin and histological slides were sectioned and stained. He also meticulously prepared a detailed map indicating the location of each of the blocks and their source. 

These blocks and the remaining pieces of Einstein's brain have since then remained in the possession of Dr. Harvey.  They have traveled around with him from Princeton to the Midwest and then returned to Princeton again. Being a pathologist, Dr. Harvey was not in a position to interpret and study the brain in his possession and so he gave tissue blocks and slides to as many as 18 investigators. Based on Harvey's photographs and slides, several peer-reviewed publications have dissected Einstein's brain - literally and metaphorically, against his wishes to try and find any features that might make him special. From increased number of neurons in the frontal lobe and increased glia:neuron ratios to larger astrocytic processes, a number of changes, big and small have been recorded. And yet, none of these can explain anything quite conclusively because our brains change with us. They are different with age, gender, disease state, and intellect. And to identify significant changes in Einstein's brain one would also need a large set of perfectly matched control brains - which are difficult to procure. 

Nonetheless, the quest for Harvey's samples has continued. To try and trace the original materials, to study and analyze the tissue blocks and to spot a difference. Many papers have been published and continue to be published as we make Einstein pay the price of his genius.

After more than half a century since his death, parts of Einstein's brain remain missing. Upon Dr. Harvey's death, a large collection of photographs, tissue blocks and slides came into the possession of his estate and were then donated to the national museum of heath and medicine in 2010. Somewhere else pieces of Einstein's brain are probably still floating around in glass vials of formalin or lying embedded in blocks of paraffin as scientists try and explain his insights into our physical world to the presence and absence of structures on his brain.

The man who discovered the space-time warps and tried to unify the physical theories of our existence is denied the most fundamental of our rights - the right to privacy and the right to self determination. And yet, the public's imagination is captivated by the minute changes observed in the structure of his brain than by the denial of his very fundamental rights. 

And lest you think that Einstein was an exception - let me clarify that he was not. Men and women at the ends of the bell curve have been subjected to such persecution time and again. 

Willa Cather's letters have remained restricted since her death in 1947; but today a fat volume of those letters has been published. Georgia O'Keeffe's letters to her husband were unavailable for twenty five years after her death but today, they are online, available to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection. Some people like Somerset Maugham burnt their correspondences for precisely this reason. Jane Austen's family also recognized this as her sister Cassandra burnt most of her letters. And yet, scholars and readers alike are captivated by the celebrity and the genius. We justify the public scrutiny of Angelia Jolie's lifestyle or of decision to have a mastectomy. We are able to forgive the paparazzi hounding of the british royal family that led to the death of Princess Diana. Our curiosity to understand the workings of a great mind seems to dominate every concern of privacy, freedom or even decency that we normally seem to take for granted. 

This brings one to the question of rights to an individual. By publishing their work, making a movie or proposing a theory - does an individual relinquish his/her rights? Does it puts them squarely in the eye of public adulation and criticism? And yet, for that which a writer, a scientists or a celebrity chooses to not reveal - shouldn't his/her privacy be respected?
Is death the ultimate abdication of one's authority over one's own life, one's thoughts and one's freedoms?
Death is a great leveler but for those who stray from the median, death seems to bring with it restrictions that previously did not exist. 

Would you tolerate the same principles to be applied to your near and dear ones? To their thoughts, their minds and their organs? Where are the lines drawn? 

A society's obsession with genius is a sign of its strife to perfect itself and to move ahead. But this seemingly noble quest is also a sign of its obsession with the homogenization of its people - to box its people into tiny little units of perfection that can be successfully propagated. 

This brings me to the perplexing question raised by Roxanna Robinson in a recent New Yorker post:

"It’s the work that draws the scrutiny. We writers reveal ourselves through our work, and in some ways it’s absurd to think that we can maintain our privacy: we gave up privacy when we mailed off that first manuscript, that manuscript in which we revealed our most burning and intimate selves. ---- If we burn the letters, we won’t put out the fire. It will continue, now fueled by speculation. Maybe the real question is not, “Should we restrict our letters after we die?” but “Should we sit down at this desk and start making sentences?” That’s the biggest risk." 

And yet, if this remains the question that haunts the gifted individuals at the right edge of the human distribution curve - what incentive do they have to make a difference, to change the world? Should they stop making their sentences too? 

References: 

1) Driving Mr. Albert: a trip across America with Einstein's brain by Michael Paterniti
2) The cerebral cortex of Albert Einstein: a description and preliminary analysis of previously unpublished photographs; Brain (A journal of neurology), 2013, Dean Falk, Frederick E Lepore and Adrianne E Noe
3) Burn your letters by Roxanna Robinson, New Yorker, 2013
4) Possessing Genius: The bizarre Odyssey of Einstein's Brain by Carolyn Abraham

Butterfly on a bullet: crafting of the story

Little more than a decade ago, America woke up to a disaster. The unthinkable had happened 20 miles above them. Space shuttle Columbia, a symbol of spaceflight, of American technology and engineering prowess was on its way back to Earth after spending 16 days in the orbit with a crew of seven and it did not survive the ride.

What remained were 83,900 pieces of this 1.8 billion spacecraft spread over seven states of North America. Architects of the American space program, the scientists at NASA, were now under intense scrutiny and the subject of a 6-month long investigation. In the aftermath of the accident, nearly 5,500 people scoured through the lakes, bushes and trees in an area the size of Connecticut to piece together the story behind the crash. It was one of the biggest jigsaw puzzles of all time and it was being assembled even as newer pieces were being found - all under relentless a media glare. 

From the ashes of this wreckage, there emerged a truth and a story about discovery of that truth. This quest transformed the people who were involved in it. One among them was Lee - Robert Lee Hotz, a seasoned reporter and writer, who brought to life the story behind the tragedy that was Columbia. It was a story that had been in headlines for six months that had been intensely followed and yet poorly understood. It was story that had been reported ad nauseam and yet could not be ignored (even by the Pulitzer board as Lee was awarded his second of three Pulitzers for this story).

I was one of the fifty writers and scientists listening with rapt attention to Lee's narrative  at the Santa Fe science-writing workshop in May this year. We were there to learn from the masters about the craft of writing and reporting and learn.

Lee’s involvement in this story began when his editor at LA Times walked up to him and asked him to step back from the everyday reporting of the Columbia crash and to follow the development of the investigation itself. Despite being a reporter, he was to walk away from a breaking news story and to follow its development from behind the scenes. His task was to take the public behind the scenes of the investigation and trace the story to its end. The task at hand was unusual because he was to report on something that had already been reported - hundreds of times in the very least. He was left with the “cold embers of a twice-told story” and he had to present it with a completely new  perspective. And so he set about finding his story, his narrative. He set up electronic trip wires and followed the story as it unfolded in hundreds of places over thousands of news clippings. Lee says of the investigation, “As a matter of forensic engineering, the investigation into the accident that killed the seven crew members aboard the space shuttle Columbia was the most extensive scientific inquest in history.”

At the workshop, we witnessed the birth of this story from a tale of destruction. Just as the wreckage of Columbia was pieced together, we learnt of the art and skill behind piecing together a narrative – one word at a time. There were many lessons in store for all of us. They are the simplest of reporting lessons and yet many a time, it is with the simple, that the errors begin.

1)    Begin at the beginning - you cannot write what you have not reported:

While that may seem fairly obvious, reporting is also the stage where most errors are made.

Lee mentions something that the great writers always seem to do: pay meticulous attention to sensory detail. “To sights, sounds, smells, textures, colors. To people and their personal detail, to photos on their desk, to their dress, their appearance, their hobbies. They are all revealing pieces of the mosaic of human character.” Latch on to sensory detail that can later provide literary nuggets for your readers to get a perspective, a window into your story.

2)    Shed your preconceptions – they blind you from your sources:

The human ability to expect, anticipate and generalize makes us evolutionarily successful but it also leads one to approach most stories with an expectation of what we hope to find. This is fatal to a reporter who needs to listen carefully to the story that his sources and evidences are trying hard to tell him. Needless to say, one needs to be able to approach a story without any preconceived notions or prejudices.

3)    Look people in the eye and give your curiosity a free reign - wander:

“Deadlines, pressures and the sprint for money, quote and a hard lead, can often make one very blinded and focused.”

But this is when one must trust their instincts and explore.

“Hang up the phone and get out of the office. Talk to people directly. I knocked on doors in nine cities, from Huntsville to Boston. It was time consuming, lonely, expensive, and yet always revealing. The further I went from managed news events, the more I learned.” He says candidly, “go away from you comfort zone and open yourself up to people”. One needs to wander into blind alleys and sometimes one of them will give you a story. It was one such blind alley-like digression that brought Lee to Chauncy Birdtail, a part-time firefighter from Montana who took up the job of hunting for Columbia’s parts in order to pay off a fine of 900$ for drunken driving.  Chauncy Birdtail is a character whose presence lends a lot of color and depth to the story. This is one striking advice in today’s internet and technology driven world where we tend to do most of our research from blogs, books and websites. It is for this very reason that I find Lee’s advice to “hang out in the lab, look people in the eye, knock on doors, meet people”, very important and worth remembering.

4)    Organize as you go – there is never going to be “the” moment to set everything aside and organize:

Organization of the reported material is critical in any story, more so in a story that was covered by more than 20,000 news stories and involved 130 interviews with accident investigators, scientists and NASA employees across the United States. Lee also burrowed his way through government reports and public hearing transcripts spanning the quarter-century of the space program. Of these reports, Lee says, “the best stories are hidden in the fine print of any government report that most people don’t read”. To organize and digest all this information pouring in from all sides, Lee built a searchable computer database, which was religiously updated every single day. What he also did was to update the story every day with ideas, questions, impressions, problems, so that “one never loses track of what one doesn’t know”.

Thankfully for rest of us, technology has come along further in the past decade and there are softwares like Ask Sam (for windows), Devonthink (for mac) and scrivener (for mac again) that let you do something similar (and perhaps more) without having to build a database on your own.

Not so surprisingly, Lee also had 10 yellow legal pads of hand written interview notes that he had indexed by topic. And in these went his impressions, thoughts and possible follow-ups after every interview.

5)     History matters – dig deeper that you think you need:

As a scientist by training, I couldn’t have agreed more with Lee, when he said, “In every story, history matters, context matters.” - because they do. As digging deeper into story of Columbia revealed to Lee - the accident was two decades in the making. The conditions for the fatal flight were set by the political and economic decisions that shaped the original flawed design of the shuttle spacecraft. In fact, contrary to what he expected in the beginning, his story is not about the shuttle or its victims. This becomes the narrative arc of the story, the very spine that keeps it standing through the many explorations.

6)    Persist – and the sources shall oblige:

This is a word that journalists and scientists both best understand. It is no surprise then that science writing sometimes demands just that. Lee says, “Many shuttle officials never talked directly to me or anyone else in press. The head of the investigating commission never spoke to me despite repeated requests for an interview over three months. Yet many people inside the space agency and the investigation did talk to me at length. All of them had to be courted.” And that is where dogged persistence comes into play.

7)    Find a guide – he will show you the way:

“Find a guide. A person who can blaze the path for you through the sidelines of the story”, says Lee. You need someone to show you the territory because you are mostly an outsider, unaccustomed to the terrain. Find a guide. Some one, whose perspective can orient you and your investigation. An anonymous source became Lee’s guide for the Columbia story and helped him determine the questions that needed to be asked.

8)    How to piece it all together – shaping the outline:

Even though reporting a story seems like the most daunting part of a story, it does not end there. The writer’s job only begins now with the piecing together of these fragments into a cogent whole. Of this particular story, Lee says, he faced the same problem as NASA’s investigative team.

To piece together Columbia’s thousands of scattered pieces and circuit components into a meaningful and revealing whole, NASA did their reconstruction by laying out every one of their 83,900 shuttle parts onto the silhouette of the space craft; Lee did his outlining of the story in MS word. He reveals to us that he drafted the story by first defining rough chapter outlines and then making bins within the outline. Each bin contained relevant facts, quotes and the source information as footnotes. (This way, when re-organized, the bins carried their sources with them making it easy for him to avoid plagiarizing and for the fact checkers.)

Doing this surely was an arduous task as one needs to burrow through a story to find every relevant factoid and to provide a context for it all. His outline was a gigantic 27,000 words long monograph at the end of which he was still searching for his story. He says with all honesty, “this is when you find out what you have” – the story that you pitched or something that totally caught you by surprise.  And then begins the real process of writing the story.

9)    Don’t begin, just start – “there is no such thing as a writer’s block”

Many people I know struggle to get that perfect first sentence, before they can move on to the second. They then try and perfect the second sentence before moving onto the third.  This makes the whole process of writing a rather painful and stuttered process. Lee says, “Don’t do that. Don’t begin; just start. Write one chunk after another. Try to be as hard and as sharp as you can. You can always trim back but you can’t trim what you haven’t put in.”

In the instance of the Columbia story, everything was public and available and the beginning was unclear. And so he did what makes most sense – “When in doubt, write in a chronological order.”

10) “If you like it, kill it”

Even as the first draft of the story is sculpted into words, one is left with the most painful process of it all - chiseling the story for a smooth but sharp finish. Editing a draft is a painful process and Lee did six rounds of revision before he could show the story to anyone but himself. And this process was guided by something that the raspy voiced, Ed Berlin, his former editor told him:

“You like it.

It’s really beautiful.

Kill it.”

This according to Lee is great advice because we, as men and women with words, get too attached to our own words and phrases; often times at the expense of clarity and brevity.

11) Find the narrative arc and find a good editor:

Having written six drafts of his story, Lee then took the outline of his story to an editor - someone whose advice can be trusted but ignored when needed. This is something that we all often struggle with – finding that trained eye to locate the rips, tears and knots in the fabric of the story. Most people turn to friends, family members, mentors, or former editors. Luckily for Lee, L Myer, a Pulitzer winning editor and a former white house correspondent was willing to help.

At this point, despite having written the outline of the story, Lee was searching for the narrative arc.

Myer found it for him.

Lee’s outline for the story began with the re-entry of the shuttle.

“One Columbia crew member didn't wear a space helmet, so smooth was the descent.

Too elated to bother, or perhaps too confident, three of them did not put on their orange pressure-suit gloves.

On the flight deck, shuttle commander Rick Husband, 45, chugged down three plastic flagons of saline solution to keep from getting lightheaded, a common side effect of reentry. It tasted slightly like seawater.

Pilot William McCool, 41, pored over a pre-landing checklist. Crew members Kalpana Chawla, 41, and Laurel Clark, 41, sitting behind him, watched raptly as superheated gases licked across the cabin windows.

Seated back in the mid-deck area, Michael Anderson, 43, David Brown, 46, and Ilan Ramon, 48, could not see what lay ahead.

The seven men and women were plunging out of orbit into the atmosphere over the South Pacific on the last leg of a journey that 22 years of repetition had turned into a NASA routine.

For 16 days, they had circled Earth. Now they could return.”

But after Myer, Lee’s investigative story began with James Hillock who uses pencils and a mail room balance to find out just how little it takes to bring down a space shuttle. His former lede with the crew-members entering the air space and being engulfed by a fire ball was no longer relevant to the narrative arc. The story was not about the accident or its victims. The story, as Lee now realized was about an agency cloaked in complacency and unwittingly waiting for an accident to happen. 

He had finally found his narrative arc.

He now needed to edit the story. Myer says to Lee of his editing process: “Indeed on the first day of the editing, I read through the piece, mark the weakest part and then remove. On the second day, I read through the piece and remove the weakest part. On the third day, I read through the piece and remove the weakest part and so on. I do this, until the stuff that is left really slaps you in the face. Hope this helps.”

12) Write. Re-write. Re-write. Re-written. Re-writing.

With the story in place, the last task at hand is to find the best words to build the most compelling picture. This was a task that Lee did in close collaboration with his editor. They first divided the story into chapters to arrive at a global narrative arc. Each chapter was then sculpted, word-by-word, line-by-line to achieve a tone of forensic terseness and brevity. Together, they went through thirty-two drafts spending late nights and early mornings working on this six-part, 13,000 word, nail-biter of a story. The multipartite editing process helped them make every word and every sentence carry the story. There was nothing superfluous, nothing unnecessary.

Every one of the six parts was a story in itself and a part of the bigger whole. They removed fuzzy generalizations, analogies, adverbs and adjectives to give this investigation its forensic tone and import. They relied heavily on verbs, as every great writer has already confessed. Their gas guns belched, their parts shattered, scattered and their subjects dared, discovered, radioed, twirled and teetered.

13) Like all journeys, stories have a destination.

“Write your ending with the same care as the lede. If possible, write the beginning with the end in mind.” The end of every story - like the end of every journey - should be a destination.

The Tragic tale of Columbia and its crew comes back a full circle in Lee’s story as it ends by outlining the last minutes of the shuttle’s re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere and the echo of that disaster that reverberated for months on end.

“A mystery can transform those who pursue it. The people involved in the Columbia inquest may never be free of it. Memories have a life of their own. Regrets linger.

Should they start to fade, there will be reminders.

Just a few weeks ago near Chireno, Texas, a farmer feeding his cattle discovered a jagged piece of alloy about the size of a fountain pen jammed in a bale of hay.

He took it to the county sheriff, who duly sent it by overnight express to NASA.

It was another piece of Columbia.

They turn up about once a week.”

These are lessons that are simple enough (to forget) and that is precisely why they need to be remembered and actively followed.