SCIENCE TALK '21 SPEAKERS SERIES: Julie Rehmeyer

Welcome to the Science Talk Blog’s Meet the Science Talk ‘21 Speaker series! Each week we will highlight some of our exciting speakers. Registration for Science Talk ‘21 is now open!

Photo courtesy of Julie Rehmeyer

Julie the Author of "Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer’s Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn’t Understand" and is a Freelance Science Writer based in Santa Fe, NM and Boulder, CO. She was a graduate student in mathematics at MIT and found the culture so abusive  that she left, brokenhearted. She found a new calling in science writing, and she’s written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Discover, Slate and many other publications.

She will be speaking on the panel “Should I Stay or Should I Go?: The Value of a PhD” on  Thursday, March 25. The full agenda is available on the Science Talk website.

Get to know Julie ​

What’s the most rewarding piece you’ve produced or project you’ve worked on? 

The answer to these two are the same: I worked for years to expose the extreme scientific flaws in the PACE trial, which claimed that exercise and psychotherapy can treat or even cure chronic fatigue syndrome. As a patient, the result was immediately suspicious, since it didn’t fit with my experience, and when I and other patients dug into the science, we saw the massive problems leading to the unlikely result. But other journalists covered the trial credulously, and it was extremely difficult to get the truth out there. When I and another journalist did (aided enormously by the heroic efforts of a group of patients), it helped force the CDC to change its treatment recommendations for the illness.

What’s the one tip about science writing or communication you wish you’d known starting out? 

Friendships are absolutely critical in this business. Help people generously, and ask for help from others. Don’t be intimidated by people who seem to have already “made it” as journalists — science journalists tend to be remarkably helpful.

Who is your favorite science communicator? 
​
I’m enormously grateful to Ed Yong for the broadness of his vision in covering Covid. He’s done so much to bring attention to Long Covid and to its links with myalgic encephalomyelitis (aka chronic fatigue syndrome). He’s serving as a model for other science journalists for attention to power and marginalization within science.