The Berkeley Science Review: Articles

Berkeley Groks
Spreading science news by any means necessary (view PDF)
by Charlie Emrich

Getting a dose of science used to be such a chore. You’d have to pore through a mountain of journals and wade through the swamp of jargon every month. Fortunately for all of us, Frank Ling and Charles Lee take the pain out of staying in the know with their weekly KALX radio show, Berkeley Groks. The half-hour program is equal parts newscast and freewheeling conversation between the two hosts, Ling and Lee, who cover the week’s developments in the scientific world with an approachable, funny, and at times downright irreverent style. Berkeley Groks has been broadcast at noon every Wednesday—“it’s the fulcrum of the week,” quips Lee—since early 2001, generating over 200 episodes in all.

The show typically begins with a round-up of the week’s discoveries in science, followed by the interview of a guest, who is later quizzed on five questions generated by the “Grokatron 5000” supercomputer. Recent guests include George Larson, editor of Air & Space magazine and Michelle Feynman, daughter of the late, great physicist Richard Feynman. The show’s roster also boasts a number of Nobel prize winners, George Foreman, journalist Bill Moyers, and Ling’s favorite, Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind.

Ling and Lee met while undergraduates at Cal Tech and both went on to pursue PhDs at Berkeley. They cooked up the idea for a science show after working in the news department at KALX. The pilot episodes they pitched were panned for being too dry so they shifted to a conversational style that Ling describes as being “like Click and Clack,” the two brothers that host the NPR show Car Talk. Both Lee and Ling have since finished their PhDs and are now postdocs—Ling at Cal and Lee at the University of Chicago— still going strong with their radio show.

As for the future, Lee says they “had the idea to expand to other stations,” but Ling stresses that they’re “not supposed to use the ‘s’ word.” Syndication. That hasn’t stopped them from branching out to the internet. Most of their past episodes are available through their website, as well as the new format du jour, the podcast. For those not in the know, podcasting does for radio what TiVo does for television, allowing you record a program for later consumption. Podcasting enables listeners to download a radio program to their computer or iPod, so they can listen to it whenever they like. Kickstarted by former MTV VJ Adam Curry, podcasting has grown from a grass roots effort to a new media outlet. Beyond Groks, you can catch podcasts from Rush Limbaugh, the Philadelphia Eagles, CNN, and even Fox’s “The OC” (yes, that “OC”).

So will podcasting be the medium of the future for Berkeley Groks? Lee is skeptical, pointing out that radio is “a medium where anyone can tune in. It’s very cheap to transmit, very cheap for people to get” and by comparison, computers are still quite pricey. “People have been talking about the death of radio for years, and it’s not going to happen.” Whatever does happen, Berkeley Groks will be there, making sense of science for the rest of us.

Charlie Emrich is a graduate student in biophysics.

Want to hear more?
Check out Berkeley Groks every Wednesday at noon on KALX 90.7 FM. Podcasts can be found at groks.net or through the iTunes music store.

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