Knut Schmidt-Nielsen 1915-2007

Knut Schmidt-Nielsen died a couple of weeks ago. He was an incredible comparative physiologist, and most of these obituary-like articles will undoubtedly focus on his enormous output (more than 270 scientific papers and 5 books), his contributions to our understanding of water and salt balance in animals, his work on countercurrent exchange systems, and the fact that he won the International Prize for Biology in 1992. Some of them might even point out that there’s a life-sized statue of him on the Duke University campus.

He was also one of the best teachers I’ve ever had.

Knut had already retired when I started graduate school at Duke, but he would occasionally teach a short seminar on writing scientific papers. It had the tongue-in-cheek title “How to Write so that Nobody will Read You.” Scientific papers are curious beasts, much maligned for being dry, repetitive, and full of impenetrable jargon. Knut showed us that this was the fault of poor writing, not an unavoidable feature of the form itself. He had spent years collecting bad examples: titles that didn’t tell you why the paper was interesting, abstracts that hid the paper’s conclusions in layers of acronyms, figure captions that summarized all the data in the figure instead of higlighting one or two key points. He had us edit his examples until they were clear and understandable. He showed us that writing well is hard work.

Before that class, I thought that I couldn't write well. When it was finished, I knew that I could write. I just didn't expect it to be easy anymore.