Deborah Blum: Award-Winning Science Writer
About the Author:
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science journalist, the best-selling author of six books, and a writer with a long-standing interest in poison in our everyday lives, in our history and culture, and in far too many murders.
She blames her parents, in part, for that slightly twisted approach to science writing. Her mother, Ann, was a devoted reader of murder mysteries and owned copies (66) of every Agatha Christie novel ever published. Her father, Murray, was an entomologist who specialized in venoms who once kept a black widow (in a plexiglass container) as a dining table centerpiece. He also gave her a tarantula as a housewarming present for her first college apartment.
He also taught her to love chemistry. In fact, she started college as a science major planning to become a chemist. Her time in university laboratories taught her real respect for the necessary precision of science - and also that a student inclined to daydream might be just a little risky in a laboratory setting. She decided to change majors the day she set her hair on fire in a Bunsen burner. “Do you smell smoke?” asked her lab instructor. She realized that she and everyone close to her would be safer if she wrote about chemistry rather than practicing it.
After graduating with an undergraduate journalism degree from the University of Georgia and master’s degree focused on environmental journalism from the University of Wisconsin, she worked as a science writer for McClatchy Newspapers, for 15 years, winning a Pulitzer in 1992 for a series on ethical issues in primate research. That work led to her first book, The Monkey Wars. She went on to write a second book, Sex on the Brain, and then took a position as a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin. There she continued as a professor of practice, both teaching and working as a freelance writer for publications including The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Time, The Wall Street Journal and more. She also continued as a book author, becoming increasingly interested in defining moments in the history of science, producing books that looked at love and affection (Love at Goon Park) and a scientific quest to prove life after death at the turn of the 20th century (Ghost Hunters).
In 2015, she left the University of Wisconsin for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). serving as director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, an international fellowship program for science journalists, for the next ten years. While there, she founded an award-winning science magazine, Undark, which drew its unusual name from the marketing of radium products in the 1920s (the story of radium is the focus of a chapter in The Poisoner’s Handbook). She also continued to investigate the ways that poison tends to seep into daily life.
Her next book looked at the invention of food safety in the United States, illuminating the truly terrible food supply in the 19th century, rife with fraud and dangerous chemical compounds, and the fight to regulate them and protect American consumers. That book, The Poison Squad, focused on a federal chemist, Harvey Wiley, who made it a personal mission to make the food supply safer. Among other tactics, he created an experimental study, in which he deliberately fed suspected toxic food additives to young coworkers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That study, nicknamed “the Poison Squad” by newspaper reporters, was one of the first to analyze the risks of putting materials like formaldehyde, borax, arsenic and lead in the American food supply and it played a vital role in the passage of the country’s first federal food safety laws in 1906. Blum’s book, which explored the truly dangerous food sold before the law and the truly crazy politics that led to its passage, was named a 2018 New York Times Notable book and also became a PBS documentary.
She stepped down as KSJ director in 2025, moved to North Carolina, and is now working to complete the third in her planned trilogy of books about poison, this one about female poisoners, their overlooked importance in our history and culture, and the way their personal stories illuminate the twists and turns and darker corners of human society. Tentatively titled, The Weapon: Women and Poison in our Murderous World, it is scheduled to be published in 2027.
More information on the book and on Deborah’s upcoming newsletter about poison to be released soon. Because the story of poison is too good to end just yet.
