Tom Levenson: Henry
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2015
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Used to the controlled uncertainties of his work, science writer Tom Levenson is forced to confront the dramatic uncertainty of whether he’ll be able to adopt a son. Tom Levenson writes books (most recently The Hunt for Vulcan) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits. His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others. By day he professes at MIT, where he directs the Graduate Program in Science Writing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU a scientist? |
| 0:06.0 | I felt right. |
| 0:08.0 | And I just thought, well, I figured it out. |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:13.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hi, everyone, I'm Ben Lilley, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:30.1 | This week's story is from Tom Levinson. It was recorded in October 2015 at Oberon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Science Writers' 2015 meeting. |
| 0:46.4 | Once upon a time, actually 1999, my wife and I decided we wanted to have a child. So we set out in the usual way to do so, the fun way. And nothing happened. And after a while, we got the message. There was nothing we could do to persuade two of our own haploid cells to consent to a merger. |
| 1:14.2 | So it was time for plan B. Adoption. And not just any adoption. You see, I really wanted to do this baby thing right from the start, you know, right at the birth, or as close to it as possible. |
| 1:27.3 | And that meant we were talking |
| 1:28.6 | about a domestic identified adoption, which is to say we were looking for a newborn in the United |
| 1:35.2 | States whose mother already knew who we were, we were, and we her. And turns out there's a fairly |
| 1:42.2 | well-established process for this, and we just started down that path. |
| 1:45.5 | We took a whole bunch of pictures of our house, of ourselves, of the room that our imagined child would inhabit. |
| 1:53.0 | And we started writing our pitch letter, which, you know, it's an interesting thing to have to write to persuade somebody you haven't met yet that you are the |
| 2:01.6 | perfect parents for their as yet unborn child. |
| 2:05.8 | So we wrote that and then we rewrote it and then we rewrote it. |
| 2:08.9 | And finally, by the end of the summer, we were ready to go. |
| 2:12.5 | And we got all our stuff together and we shipped off the package to our baby broker. |
| 2:17.3 | There are these people around the country whose job it is basically to match up would-be adoptive |
| 2:21.7 | couples with expectant mothers who are considering adoption. |
... |
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