AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books

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Spotlight on Science Writers: Ainissa Ramirez

Abigail

In a nutshell, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, explores how technology shaped society—from our culture to our bodies to even our brains. This book highlights little-known inventors and how their innovations transformed how we live in many, unexpected ways. Readers will see how the telegraph had a hand in shaping language, how the lightbulb altered our sleep, and how steel rails helped to commercialize Christmas.

Questions about writing:

When did you start writing? What inspired you to start writing?
The moment where I seriously began to explore writing for the general public was when I was in graduate school. I had a chance to teach an introduction to materials science class at a community college and loved making this topic engaging to students with fun handouts. It was also in graduate school when I was a AAAS Mass Media Fellow. I was placed in the Washington, DC bureau of Time magazine and contributed to a few headlines. I became smitten by science writing and looked for ways to make materials science compelling to the general public. It was years later when I settled on writing a book.

What, in your opinion, are the most important elements of good writing?
There are plenty of good books out there on writing. I subscribe to William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. I would also add that it is important to remember that the function of a sentence is to make a reader want to read the next sentence. If a sentence is bloated with unnecessary fluff or mired with boastful phrases to impress a reader with a writer’s intellect, then perhaps that writer might have forgotten that such digressions will make a reader stop reading. Sentences are not for bragging. Sentences are vehicles to transport the reader to where the writer wants the reader to go.

What was your favorite part, and your least favorite part, of the writing journey?
My favorite part was the moment when I found a story that I loved. This might happen during an interview or after spending days in a library. I call this moment “finding a gem.”
My least favorite part is when I find something and work on it for a long time, and then find that it won’t work in the overall story. This is when I have to cut it out. That part is not fun.


Questions about your prize-winning book:

Can you share something about the book that isn’t in the blurb or excerpt?
There are 102 images in the book. Some were buried in long forgotten archives. Some have not seen the light of day for decades. When writing my book, I wanted lots of pictures because visuals can help people experience the information in different ways. Additionally, these pictures are clustered in the center of the book, making it a family album, of sorts. When I am sharing my book with others, I often go right to the pictures. People of all ages and backgrounds seem to resonate with them.

What is the key theme and/or message in the book?
We shape technology and then technology shapes us.

What is the significance of the title?
The title winks at the field of chemistry. Alchemy was a pursuit to transform common base metals into something precious like gold. In my book, inventors were on a mission to create something new based on a material, and what that invention did is transform society in unexpected ways. That’s alchemy.

Tell us about the process for coming up with the cover.
The idea for the book cover came to me by accident. One day when making a new computer file for the book, I inadvertently typed “Au.” This caused me to pause because I recognized it was the symbol for gold. Instantly, I got a piece of paper and drew out the words “alchemy” and “us” around those letters. Later on, I passed that slip of paper to designer George Corsillo, who made this marvelous design. The color of the letters was later changed so that the cover was easier to read.

What were the key challenges you faced when writing this book?
I had to learn how to write this book while I was writing it. The key element was how to get the information into my head and have a good way to retrieve it down the road. When I went to archives, I scan materials and then added page numbers to the scanned pdf before I printed it out. I did all of this so that I could always have a way to get back to it. All in all, my process consisted of collecting materials and then finding a way to retrieve them by tagging them in a coordinated way. There was a lot of chaos in the process, but I soon got comfortable with that. Eventually, it all came together.

What was the highlight of writing this book?
This book led to my own alchemy. I learned a great deal while writing it. My sentences grew more confident over the years. I became braver when traveling to faraway places. I also became more comfortable with uncertainty. I am grateful for what this book did for me. It shaped me.

What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?
The authors that most influence my desire to write great science books were Isaac Asimov (Understanding Physics), Alan Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams), Oliver Sacks (Uncle Tungsten), Dava Sobel (The Planets) and Primo Levi (The Periodic Table). Their work gave me permission to do the kind of writing I wanted to do.

Questions about YOU:

3. If you had to describe yourself in three words, what would they be?
Science. Speaking. Writing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ainissa Ramirez, Ph.D. is an award-winning scientist and science communicator, who is passionate about getting the general public excited about science. A graduate of Brown University, she earned her doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford. Dr. Ramirez started her career as a scientist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and later worked as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Yale. She authored the books The Alchemy of Us and Save Our Science, and co-authored Newton’s Football. She has written for Forbes, Time, The Atlantic, Scientific American, American Scientist, and Science and has explained science headlines on CBS, CNN, NPR, ESPN, and PBS.

Her book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, was the winner of the 2021 AAAS/Subaru Book Prize in the Young Adult Book category.

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