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Interviewed by Michael Tabasko, Senior Science Writer/Editor of the NIH Catalyst. 

Tabasko:This is the oral history with Laura Stephenson Carter, former Editor-in-Chief of The NIH Catalyst. We’ll start with some background information. Can you tell us where you were raised?

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Carter: The Huyck Preserve is a 2,000-acre nature preserve and research station. It was founded in 1931 by my great aunt, Jessie Van Antwerp Huyck. The property originally belonged to my great uncle, Edmund Niles Huyck. [The Preserve was] originally 500 acres and had beautiful waterfalls, lakes, and ponds. Before he died, he said no one person should be allowed to own this land and it should be available for the public. He died in 1930 and in 1931, his wife created the Huyck Preserve and opened it up to the public. There are beautiful trails to walk on. In 1938, [the board of directors] added the research station. There was a biologist from Cornell University who was invited to do an assessment. His name was Bill Hamilton. He recommended that a research station be started and that researchers be allowed to do natural history research at the Preserve. The Preserve has grown to about 2,000 acres now. It’s still a research station. In the 1930s, people who got their career starts there include famous biologists like Eugene OdomOdum, whose textbooks you can still get in college ecology classes; Donald Griffin, who discovered bat echolocation; and a number of other people. The research program is still going strong. Members of my family have been on the board of directors. There are community members as well. I was on the board of directors for quite some time and was chairman, president, and held other roles. There are still a mixture of family members and community members who are on that board, including a scientist from the American Museum of Natural History. I’m in the process of writing history of the Huyck Preserve and Biological Research Station.

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Carter: My father was a [Princeton-educated] chemical engineer. He worked for M.W. Kellogg Company in New York City and [later] Allied Chemical [first in Buffalo, New York, then in Morristown, New Jersey]. One of the reasons we moved around so much was [because] his job locations changed. Then after he retired, he worked for Bechtel down in [Louisville,] Kentucky. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She never went to college, but we were always impressed that she could do the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in pen! I don’t know many people who could do that today. Anyway, she had her hands full raising six kids. I’m the oldest of six. I have two sisters and three brothers. My parents had the three girls first so we could do the housework and wait on my brothers hand and foot [laughs]. My sister Elizabeth owns her own business, a bookkeeping business out in Colorado. My late sister Annette worked for Elizabeth’s business, and she also did a number of other jobs. My brother Kenny was a truck driver. My brother James is a truck driver. My brother Lee had a variety of jobs. The only ones of us still living are Elizabeth, and James, [and me].

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Carter: I was a member of the Brownies [and Girl Scouts] so I went to [scouting] activities. At high school and also in college, I worked for the school paper. In high school, I was in the debate club, which was strange because I was very shy. I didn‘t like to talk, so I don’t know why I joined the debate club. [I was also in the musical Kiss Me Kate as a member of the chorus. I had several jobs in high school—babysitting, waitressing, and working in the store at the nearby V.A. Hospital.]

CarterTabasko: What caused you to choose a career in science journalism and did you face any resistance or challenges?

TabaskoCarter: Well, I always loved writing. From the time I was young, I would write stories. I did a comic book series with a friend in fourth grade. I just loved writing. I love science, too. I didn’t know what area to focus on in science because there were just so many different fields. I couldn’t make up my mind. Then I realized I loved writing about science. In college, I actually interviewed some science majors who had gone to Woods Hole, which is a research station up in Massachusetts. I realized I loved writing about science more than I liked doing science, but I didn’t go to graduate school until much later.

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Carter: Right after college, I went to work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a management trainee, and I did a number of different things. In the management training program, you got to rotate through different areas. I worked in check processing. The first thing I did was write a procedure manual. It was not exactly journalism. It was going into a nighttime operation where people process checks—things weren’t done online the way they are now. I sat with everybody to learn their jobs, and then wrote about it. It was over a summer, and at the end of the summer, I had a big procedure manual to present to management. Later on, I was [a job analyst] in the personnel department, where we evaluated requests to create new jobs in different departments. I would go learn about what that job’s requirements were and then write a job description that would be approved by a committee. There was a whole process. During that time, I had to write a job description for word processing secretaries. At the time, we didn’t have computers. This was back in the late 1970s, but people were beginning to produce word processing machines, which were like early computers. Then secretaries were slowly being replaced by these word processing machines, so fewer secretaries could do the work for the executives. At first, we didn’t have anybody [at the Fed] for me to observe so I could compare it to what was being requested. So I went and did an interview with a vice president at another bank in New York. Although it was connected to my job, I realized later that was  like doing journalism because I had to go interview somebody and then write about what they told me. I actually got into trouble for that because it turned out I wasn’t supposed to contact higher level leadership at outside banks without permission. But I didn’t know that—I just did what I had to do [laughs]. After personnel, I was part of a management consulting team at the Federal Reserve Bank, where we [evaluated] secretarial services, word processing, records management, and other things. [I supervised the Records Management Department after that.] I later went back to check processing in a different office and was an assistant chief. Then we had a credit restraint task force that I got into in the late 1970s, where the Federal Reserve was trying to figure out how to crack down on credit.

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Carter: It was slightly before because I graduated from NYU [New York University] in 1992. I was doing freelance work. I wrote a children’s book on plastics recycling, and I was writing chapters for biology textbooks. I also wrote for some professional magazines. Then in 1994, we moved up to [Norwich,] Vermont. Dartmouth is right across the river from where we lived in Vermont. I applied for a job at the public affairs office at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Interestingly, I found out that the job I was filling used to be held by Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer. She had worked for Dartmouth and the Medical Center for a number of years before moving out west to continue to work on her novels. I always felt like “Oh, I’m following an in Annie Proulx’s footsteps.” Now if I could only write a novel and win a Pulitzer Prize, I would really complete the circle.

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Carter: Well, revamping The NIH Catalyst into, I think, a better-looking publication. Training the writers—I’m proud of all the writers we’ve trained. And I’m proud that, as a result of a story we did, we rescued something that’s now in the NIH Clinical Center. The story was on Building 7, which I mentioned before is where infectious disease research was going on. I was able to go on a tour with Michele Lyons [from] the History Office just to see what the inside of that building looked like before they completely tore it down. Michele was looking for artifacts that they might use for the History Office. As we went up the stairs to a conference room, I noticed this beautiful window that had an art deco image of a waterfall. It was a big window. The building was going to be destroyed—that window with it. Well, I couldn’t let that happen. On the back of the Catalyst, in our “Photographic Moment” section, I had a picture of the waterfall window, and a little bit about its history—who had it installed and all that. I said, “If anybody’s interested in this, please let us know, because it’s going to be destroyed.” John Gallin, who was head of the Clinical Center at the time, saw the story and said he wanted it. He had it removed from the building, brought over to Building 10, and installed on a wall near Lipsett Amphitheater. It’s backlit and there’s a little history about it on the side, so people know where it came from and who the inspiration was for it. I’m proud of that, too. I’m also proud that some of our stories alerted researchers to the work of others and led to collaborations.

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Carter: I like to do hiking, canoeing, snowshoeing, photography, and crafts. I didn’t mention that between the time before I started working for Dartmouth-Hitchcock, I was a counselor at a sleepaway camp for girls in Vermont. I was head of the canoeing department. That’s what got us up to Vermont in the first place. I was living up there a couple of summers since [my daughters] were at camp—a different camp than where I worked—and my husband was between jobs. We just wanted something different. We thought, “Oh, let’s move to Vermont.” [Laughs.] There were lots of outdoor activities we could do up there too.

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Carter: I don’t have any electrics. I even have my manual typewriter from college. I had an electric at one point, but they’re just so heavy. And now we have computers [laughs].

Tabasko: Back to the Catalyst. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Catalyst not only kept publishing, but it began a timeline of pandemic-related events at NIH. That timeline will be extremely valuable to historians. How did you decide to do it, and what other impacts did the pandemic have on your job?

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The advances are happening so fast in health care. We need to continue to develop reliable ways to communicate that people can trust, because there’s so much fear right now and a lot of people don’t trust science. As science writers, we need to help people gain trust by explaining things clearly, properly, accurately, and in a way that’s fun for people to read. Who knows, maybe science writers will find other ways to communicate—maybe we’ll start singing our articles or singing things about science. Maybe that’ll catch people’s attention. Maybe they’re not reading right now, or they’re bored listening to long lectures. We’ll have to have a Lady Gaga of science writing or something to really spice up the communications [laughs].

Tabasko: You’re not threatened by the concept of AI?

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