When Anne Mullens got a job working with dairy animals, she thought she was taking her first steps towards a career in animal care. Her job involved testing calves’ dung to check for protein retention in the calves from food.
While standing in a lab that smelled of cow dung with a hand on a blender churning another protein mix, Mullens came across the Globe and Mail’s science section.
“It’s like a light went on in my head. That’s what I wanted to do – talk about science,” she said.
Her realization led to a career peppered with awards for excellence in scientific and medical journalism. During 11 years at the Vancouver Sun, she won seven national awards, including two Canadian Science Writers’ Awards. Her book Missed Conceptions: Overcoming Infertility won the 1997 Edna Staebler award for creative non-fiction, and has become a resource for the medical community and the people dealing with infertility.
Medical journalism has been gaining popularity in recent years as people have become more proactive about their health.
“There is an almost insatiable demand for medical and science journalism. It is the fastest growing aspects of modern media,” said Alan Cassels, founder and project leader of Media Doctor Canada, an organization monitoring medical coverage in Canadian media.
But medical journalism is more challenging than other reporting because it involves writing about complex terms and jargon in a way that laypeople can understand. In medicine accurate, balanced reporting is crucial because consumers form opinions about health through popular press, Cassels said.
Mullens learned the value of accuracy when she wrote about lazy eye surgery based on her sister’s childhood experience. The day after the article printed, Mullens got a call from the surgeon who told her that the procedure she’d described was not in use anymore.
“He wasn’t happy,” she said. “We had to print a correction, and I learned the hard way to ask all the questions.”
Born in 1958 in Toronto, Mullens received the love of science from her surgeon father and biochemist mother. Following in her family’s footsteps, Mullens graduated from the University of Guelph with a general science degree. She spent her summers working with professors doing research in crop science and animal nutrition.
But after that look at the Globe, Mullens decided to go back to school to get a degree in journalism. She attended a one-year journalism degree program at Carleton University. A straight-A student, Mullens said she struggled with understanding journalism.
While writing a paper that asked her to argue whether media have contributed to or undermined Western civilization, she said she nearly had a nervous breakdown.
“I had five days when I couldn’t eat or write. All I could do was eat oranges,” she said. She handed in the assignment a week late, which had “never happened before.”
But it was also a “watershed moment” because she realized that her way of writing was okay, she said.
After graduation, Mullens accepted a position with the Vancouver Sun. Even though the Sun was a great working experience, she was dissatisfied with the coverage some important stories received. The paper’s series on children who needed liver transplants was such a story.
“I thought we needed to do stories that were more than the ‘gee, golly, whiz’ kind,” Mullens said.
The story of Rachel Sharma, a child waiting for liver transplant, was the serious story Mullens wanted to cover. But the paper did not see things her way. When Sharma died, the Sun flew Mullens to the UCLA hospital where Sharma had been undergoing treatment.
“Of course the doctors didn’t want to talk to me, and her mother had flown back to Canada,” she said.
She set up interviews for a medical think piece about liver conditions, but was called back the day the interviews were scheduled.
“I was so mad,” she said. “I came back and wrote a blistering memo.”
When another “liver tot” story came up, Mullens refused to cover it.
“I got an insubordination note on my file,” she said, without a flicker of regret.
In 1990, she married Keith Baldrey, a B.C. legislature reporter, and got pregnant in short order. She was also made the Vancouver Island bureau chief for the Sun, but she struggled with juggling career and family.
Mullens’ daughter Kate suffered from multiple allergies and asthma. When Kate had a severe asthma attack on deadline, Mullens left work to be with her daughter, and her editor yelled at her for not filing the story.
“That night I stood by Kate’s bed, and I realized I’d mismanaged it,” she said.
“I resigned.”
When her kids started school, she started working as a freelance writer. Mullens’ commitment to getting things right, a habit formed during her days as a medical journalist, put her in the good books of her editors.
“Writing about science simply is very difficult. I don’t like to make mistakes, but I accept them when I do,” she said. “You’ve got to do the work and take criticism from editors.”
And her editors couldn’t be happier.
“There are writers who can research but not report, and there are reporters who can write but not research. Anne is an excellent writer, reporter and researcher,” said Mary Aikins, editor of Reader’s Digest’s Vancouver bureau.
Aikins remembers Mullens’ struggle writing an article about stem cell research for the July 2007 issue of Reader’s Digest. They had to work closely to keep the story current, accurate and readable.
“It was a lot of fun because she was so open to feedback,” Aikins said.
Mullens is also good at giving feedback, said Katherine Dedyna, a Victoria Times Colonist reporter. Dedyna met Mullens when Mullens worked for two weeks at the Colonist as a copy editor.
“She’s a very affirming person. She can be very encouraging even when she’s telling you what needs improvement in your article,” Dedyna said.
Besides being a good editor, Mullens is one of Canada’s best medical reporters, Dedyna said.
“She has the ability to amass great amounts of scientific information and distill it into readable and understandable material,” Mullens’ husband Keith Baldrey said.
Although their journalistic paths didn’t cross often, Baldrey has worked with Mullens a few times. They first worked together on a pornography feature. Research for the article involved going to adult shops, and looking at pornographic material.
“We did a great job, even though it was mortifying,” Mullens said. “I think that’s maybe one reason we didn’t date until three years later.”
But they did become good friends, and when Mullens’ attention to detail got in the way of meeting deadlines, she depended on Baldrey’s help.
“She’d sometimes call me up from wherever she was filing her story, and ask me to write her lede,” he said.
Mullens says as a freelancer she has longer deadlines that allow her to immerse herself in her subject and write about it in detail. The awards she has won bear witness to her dedication to her art.
While Mullens’ successes have ensured she has an odour-free, sunshine filled office unlike the dung filled lab where she first worked, she credits science for her successes as a journalist.
“Science taught me curiosity,” she says.
