Joe Palca’s cubicle in NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters is strewn with bicycle gear from his daily commute, assorted piles of books about science, and random objects: a can of mackerel, a leaf-shaped bottle of maple syrup. From this cluttered perch, the longtime science correspondent has the power to shape what becomes news. If Joe Palca ’74 decides a story is worth putting on the air, roughly a million listeners hear it. And if he misses a story, well, some of those listeners may never hear about it.

In 1996, Science magazine published a study on a novel approach to treating cancer. Immunologist James Allison and his co-authors reported that they had successfully treated malignant tumors in mice by blocking molecules on immune system cells that act as a brake on immune response. Palca didn’t cover the study. “Nobody covered that paper,” he shrugs. “Everybody has cured cancer in mice.”

Two decades later, Allison’s immunotherapy methods have led to the first effective treatment for advanced melanoma. Patients used to die in less than a year; with treatment based on Allison’s research, some now live more than a decade. Allison has won dozens of prestigious awards for this work in recent years, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, often a precursor to the Nobel.

Someone, it seems, ought to have reported on that initial study. “If news is to tell you about the things that are important,” Palca says, “that’s the paper I should have been telling you about.” But out of all the promising studies published that week, Palca could not have known which one would make history. Reporters rarely do. “None of us in science journalism is smart enough to know which are the really important papers,” he says. “No one is.”

Nevertheless, the media generally presents scientific findings as if they were breaking news. As a result, Palca says, studies that will later prove inconsequential get the limelight, sometimes simply because they lend themselves to sexy headlines. Meanwhile, reporters inadvertently ignore research that, in hindsight, they ought to have covered (like that 1996 immunotherapy study). So a few years ago, after two decades as an NPR science correspondent, Palca had an idea. A big idea. What if he stopped trying to identify the important science stories and focused exclusively on the interesting ones?

Three years later, Joe’s Big Idea is going strong. The series tells the stories behind innovations: what drives scientists and inventors, how they come up with their ideas, and how they implement them (or try to). Palca has produced pieces on soccer-playing robots, ant traffic patterns, and a phone app that checks photos for eye disease. He’s followed efforts to end dengue fever, the search for life on Mars and the passionate quest for the perfect toothbrush. He hopes that by focusing on what’s intriguing about the scientific process, listeners will come to share his fascination. As he recently told an audience, “I want people to know there’s a joy and a delight and a beauty in science.”

The key to conveying that beauty is often the researcher. “You can’t tell a really moving story about a nanoparticle,” Palca says. “But the person studying the nanoparticle can be pretty interesting.”

Pediatric oncologist James Olson is a case in point. Olson developed a paint that makes brain tumors glow, helping surgeons to locate and remove them. While the story of the paint itself is fascinating—it’s derived from scorpion venom—the profile of the man behind it got the most emotional response of Palca’s career. It turns out Olson is a practicing physician. This is what drives his tumor research: He’s tired of telling parents their children are going to die. He’s “sick of seeing the devastation on people’s faces,” Palca says in the piece, “sick of feeling helpless.” Yet Olson has the rare ability to cast a child’s cancer prognosis in a bearable light. One parent tells him her 7-year-old’s death to cancer “was as beautiful as her birth” because he helped the family see it that way. Here’s a man who is not only trying to cure pediatric brain cancer; he’s helping parents part with children who’ve succumbed to it. A hundred listeners left grateful comments about the story online. “I had colleagues coming up and hugging me, telling me they were sitting there sobbing,” Palca says. ”And I understand it because it still makes me tear up.”

Of course, not all subjects have such inherent drama. Still, Palca says, scientists are not the cold-blooded, calculating creatures they are often presumed to be. “I’m sick of the caricature, of the white lab coat. The lab coat says ‘I’m an expert, not a person.’”

Palca’s irritation on this subject is personal. An animated guy with a mischievous streak and a penchant for tangents, he is himself a trained scientist. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology. Remember Jim Allison, the immunologist? Palca worked for him as a lab technician, his first full-time job out of Pomona College. (He also happens to be married to a molecular biologist, a deputy director at the National Institutes of Health.) Palca decamped for journalism immediately after earning his degree. Research was tedious to him. “You have to have a long attention span to be a scientist,” he says.

Palca’s attention span may not have served for years of lab work, but he has covered some impressively arcane research as a reporter. A giant hand-painted bowl in his office is proof. He received the bowl for delivering the 24th annual Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture to the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It was titled “Covering Complex Science, or How I Explained a Frank-Kasper Phase in Sphere-Forming Block Copolymer Melts to a Radio Audience.” Palca really did produce a story on a study by that name. In fact, he chose it precisely because it was so daunting. “I said I’m going to pick the most obscure thing I can find and do a thoughtful, serious story about it just to prove I can,” Palca says. (One charming detail from the piece: the researchers used marshmallows and coffee stirrers to model the molecules they studied.)

Palca claims no research is too obscure to make for an engaging story. He travels around the country giving lectures to scientists about how to couch their research in compelling terms. The trick, he says, is knowing what to leave out. Sometimes it’s the very detail the researcher is most fixated upon. Scientists tend to focus on what is new in their fields, he says, a habit that only perpetuates the media’s tendency to do the same. “A lot of the time scientists think that the ‘news’ is the new thing, which of course it is,” Palca says. “But in fact, the new thing may be pretty tedious.”

Take adaptive optics. This technology has been used in astronomical telescopes for several decades. It unblurs the blurring caused by the atmosphere. “So if you say you want to do a story about adaptive optics, well, the scientist will tell you about how they’ve tuned the laser and how the signal’s getting better and the interferometry,” Palca says. “And you say, ‘Wait a minute! You can do that? You can unblur the atmosphere?’ That’s where scientists get lost. They know about adaptive optics. It doesn’t occur to them that nobody else does.”

That’s because it’s easy to get lost in the details as a researcher, Palca says. The work can be monotonous. Palca recalls reporting on the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in the mid-1990s, an event that spawned headlines the world over. Scientific findings too often overshadow the work it took to get to them, Palca says. So his reporting focused on the tremendous effort it took to clone just one sheep. Palca did. “It took months of failure, months and months and months of boring, tedious, awful, discouraging failure to get one successful birth,” he says.

By interesting the public in the fits and starts that characterize scientific research and the personal drive that keeps researchers forging ahead, Palca hopes to convey a truer picture of how science really works. He says that the alternative, focusing on dazzling findings and reporting them as breaking news, gives the public the wrong idea. “I think it contributes to a sense of science lurching from breakthrough to breakthrough,” rather than as a continuum with incremental steps along the way, he says. It may also engender mistrust. “I wonder if the need to do more and more and more big science stories, the really exciting stories, has set science up for a fall,” Palca says. “Water on Mars? Wait a minute, I thought you figured that out already. Why are we still hearing about it?”

In the end, Palca hopes his own enthusiasm for science, and that of the people he talks to, is contagious. “The passion that people have and the desire to make a difference, it’s fun to listen to that,” he says. As he told an audience recently: “Not every study is going to lead to Teflon or Tang, but we’re going to learn something about the natural world. That’s got to be worth something in our culture.”

Photos by Carrie Rosema

The stretch of Foothill Boulevard near the corner of Osborne Street in the northeast San Fernando Valley has been infamous for nearly 25 years. It was there in 1991 that Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police officers after a high-speed chase that ended with the unemployed 25-year-old parolee being kicked, tasered and battered with batons, all captured on videotape by a nearby resident. One year later, the officers’ acquittal sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots that left 53 dead, 2,300 injured and caused $1 billion in property damage.

Today near that spot, children roam the striking, angular modern building that houses the new Discovery Cube Los Angeles, a hands-on museum aimed at teaching young people about science, technology, engineering and math, often referred to by the acronym ‘STEM.’

Inside, Kafi Blumenfield ’93, executive director of the year-old museum, kneels to join a small child sweeping his hands through the sand of an interactive exhibit that displays the resulting changes in topography on a digital map.

To Blumenfield, this is about more than science. She sees the museum as a catalyst for change in the community, a way to build a better Los Angeles by starting near the place known for the traffic stop that changed the history of a city.

“We are in a neighborhood that is full of kids with potential but lacking in resources,” Blumenfield says. “So many of our kids go jobless. They’re strong, eager, talented kids, but they’re jobless. Overlay that with the fact that we have a gap in our pipeline of young people who are ready and willing and able to enter the STEM jobs. So this is a natural fit. If we can provide these kids with additional educational support to encourage them to enter these types of jobs, it will not only make their lives and their households better, but this whole region better.”

Running a children’s science museum might seem an unlikely role for a vibrant, well-connected civic leader whose first job after majoring in politics at Pomona was as a White House intern. (She served in the Clinton Administration two years before the most famous intern in history arrived in Washington.) After earning a law degree from UCLA and working at various jobs related to such issues as housing and the environment, Blumenfield’s most recent role was president and CEO of the Liberty Hill Foundation, an L.A. nonprofit that gives about $5 million a year in grants to grass-roots organizations promoting social causes.

She has strong political ties, both professionally and personally: Her husband is Los Angeles Councilman Bob Blumenfield, a former member of the California State Assembly whose West Valley council district includes Woodland Hills, where the couple lives with their two elementary-aged children.

It was one of Blumenfield’s personal/political connections that led her to Discovery Cube LA. She was having lunch last fall with Wendy Greuel, the former Los Angeles City Controller who ran for mayor against Eric Garcetti in 2013. Greuel, then a consultant for Discovery Cube LA and now vice chair of the board, suddenly envisioned a match between the museum and Blumenfield, who had planned to take a year off to reflect on the next step in her career after leaving Liberty Hill.

“As we were talking about life transitions and things to do in the future,” Greuel says, “I heard how she cared about kids and about how to make a difference in their lives at this age, around elementary school. So I said, ‘Would you ever think about this?’ Because it was outside the box.

“But as she met with the team, you saw that she saw it as more than a building and more than a children’s science museum. She saw it as a way to train teachers to teach science, and a way to excite young girls about science. She sees it as part of a way to seek social justice. She frequently talks about this being the corner where Rodney King was beaten. I’m inspired by her when she gives those tours.

“She gets it. She gets that it’s transformative, not only for the kids who come in, but for the neighborhood. This is a community that wants to be known for something more than where Rodney King was beaten. This is something that’s a spark.”

Among the sparks for Blumenfield were conversations with her daughter, now 9, and her 6-year-old son.

“I was shocked when last year my daughter told me that she was not good at math and science,” Blumenfield says, even though the family had a tradition of outings they called Science Saturdays. “I said, ‘Why do you say that?’ She said, ‘Well, there are not a lot of girls in my class that like math and science.’ We hear that all too often. She was a big part of this project because we really want to see more young girls engaged in science, as we do with young boys.”

Her son, though, “sealed the deal,” Blumenfield says, when the family visited Santa Ana’s Discovery Cube Orange County, the well-established older sister of the two museums. (Together, the museums drew 631,045 visitors in the last fiscal year. About 220,000 have visited Discovery Cube LA since it opened last November, including 34,500 students on field trips.)

“He was 5 at the time, and I couldn’t get him out of the building,” Blumenfield says. When she cautiously broached the topic of going back to work sooner than planned to head Discovery Cube LA, her son’s response was emphatic. “‘We are in!’ he said,” she remembers with a laugh. “So they’re here a lot.”

Despite the STEM focus, Discovery Cube LA is about more than academics and career-related science. It has an additional emphasis on environmental stewardship and healthy living issues of particular importance in the San Fernando Valley, where air quality and aquifer contamination are significant concerns.

The “Aquavator” is an exhibit that simulates descending deep into the earth’s crust in a special elevator to view geological layers while learning about underground water aquifers.

In “Race to Zero Waste,” visitors stand alongside a moving conveyor belt, trying to correctly sort recyclables from other waste to divert trash from landfills. “Look, it’s the trash game,” a woman says as a child runs up to it.

Elsewhere in the museum, a faux market offers healthy local produce, green cleaning products and an opportunity for children to “shop” and check out with their selections.

Another exhibit features a portion of a built-to-scale California home, complete with solar panels. Visitors can go on a sort of scavenger hunt using handheld devices, seeking out opportunities to save energy and water. They find home computer monitors left on when not in use, becoming “energy vampires” that waste power. A kitchen faucet is programmed to intermittently drip, and observant visitors can hear the sound of the bathroom toilet running too long. (Eventually, museum staff found it necessary to screw down the lid. “You can imagine, with a bunch of potty-trainers,” Blumenfield says with a laugh.)

Playfulness aside, “we’re trying to address some of the problems of the day but do it in a very affirming way that allows people to see how they can actually effect change,” Blumenfield says. “I think that’s really important because some of the problems we’re faced with, particularly from the kids’ vantage point, it can all seem so overwhelming. They really don’t know what they can do in their little lives to make a difference. So here, they get to see it in some very practical ways.”

On the job since last August, only a few months before the November opening of a museum that earlier had stalled because of financial issues, Blumenfield is clearly in her element. She oversees a budget of about $5.3 million as well as a staff of 67 full-time and part-time workers, plus a large group of volunteers who range from teenagers to retirees. Walking the museum, she greets visitors brightly and calls workers by name.

Touted as the first major museum in the San Fernando Valley, an area with a population of more than 1.75 million, Discovery Cube LA is a new anchor in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood, a demographically diverse community with large Latino and black populations. The most visible landmark has long been the Hansen Dam Recreation Area, with its large sandy-beach manmade pool.

“It’s both very urban in ways you would expect an urban community to be, and at the same time, there’s some—I don’t know—country living, right outside our doors,” Blumenfield said. “Summer camps are tending to come here for half a day, and then they go to the pool for half a day, so it’s a great combination of science and nature.”

The community has moved on from the notoriety of the Rodney King incident, though it will be the subject of retrospectives as the 25th anniversary approaches in March. Two of the acquitted officers later served prison time after being convicted of violating King’s civil rights in a subsequent federal trial. King himself died in a backyard pool in 2012 at the age of 47.

Almost a quarter-century later, children inside the Discovery Cube museum learn about the solar system or earthquakes or how the ice on a hockey rink is made. For Blumenfield, instead of putting the funding into social change, now she is putting the fun into it.

“For me, it’s all the same thing,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if I’ve been in a legal organization, a social services organization or here, an education center, or a foundation. My career has been dedicated to providing opportunities to those who don’t have the same resources as those who have more. And to try to help people succeed, no matter if they live in downtown L.A. or here in the beautiful northeast San Fernando Valley. I think every child deserves the absolute best education, and there are many ways to go about that.

“So I don’t see the different stations that I’ve been in life, I don’t see them being that different. The beautiful thing about this place that is different, though, is I get to walk the halls, and I get to see the people that we are trying to serve. That lights me up. It gives tremendous meaning to see, every day, people who want to succeed.”

In person, Dan Weinand ’16 is a polite, soft-spoken Pomona College senior. But put him onstage and he is someone else altogether. He’s a hostile loudmouth being interrogated for a crime. He’s a laidback traveler with a Jamaican accent. He’s a TV show host who waxes poetic about the wonders of trash.

He is all of these things in a recent performance by Without a Box, the improvisational comedy group composed of students from the five Claremont Colleges. Their improv shows are a long-running tradition: Pitzer College student David Straus formed the group in 1989. Team members graduate each year, but the group endures, adding new students to the mix.

Without a Box performs about once a month during the school year, at various locations on the five campuses. Weinand, a double major in math and computer science, says it’s a kick to perform in front of fellow students—especially the Claremont crowd, who share a certain frame of reference. “I just love that only on the 5Cs can I make a linear algebra joke,” he says.

The group generally consists of anywhere from five to 10 students. However, when the 2015–2016 school year starts, Without a Box is down to three: Weinand; Lauren Eisenman, a Scripps College sophomore majoring in neuroscience; and Matthew Roberts, a Pitzer senior and history major.

Despite the small number, the crew is in fine form at the September show, held at Pitzer’s Benson Auditorium. More than 100 people are in attendance, and they look to be having a blast. The three performers wear blue Without a Box shirts, and stage props consist of little more than two chairs.

There are topical references (the Pope, Donald Trump), pantomimed actions (smoking, using a cell phone), and a spirit of play throughout. Audience interaction is a big part of the show, with members suggesting scenarios and providing snippets of dialogue. In one skit, two volunteers jump onstage to join Weinand and Roberts.

Here’s the twist: the two students move the bodies of the two performers, as if manipulating human puppets, and the dialogue flows from the movements. The scene starts with Weinand and Roberts facing each other, then Roberts is turned in the opposite direction, to which Weinand cries, “Don’t leave me!” A lovers’ spat emerges, and limbs fly every which way.

Like all good improv performers, Without a Box members embrace the “Yes, and … ” principle: the idea that you accept whatever your scene partner throws your way, however far-fetched, and build on it. As they set up the show’s final scenario—Weinand and Eisenman are co-hosts of an early-morning public access program; Roberts is the guest—they ask the audience to select a name for the TV program. The winner: “Garbage Connoisseurs.”

The two hosts gush about thrown-away toys in trash bins, exquisite finds like the tossed bodies of Barbie dolls. In comes Roberts, an authority on discarded Transformers. Then, a change of direction: the expert is uncovered as a fraud, a betrayer of garbage dreams.

Audience members eat up the show’s quirky, quick-shifting action. “It’s cool that it’s unpredictable and different,” Jonah Grubb, a Pomona senior, says afterward. “With improv, you never know what you’re going to get.”

Weinand, Eisenman and Roberts say they’re not just winging it onstage—they hone their skills through rehearsal. The group practices three times a week, doing exercises in improv game-playing, physical humor, and character work. “Doing improv might be scary if I didn’t feel comfortable with the other performers,” says Weinand. “But I totally do.

“Trust is a really big part of it,” adds Eisenman.

Growing the Group

The trio knows that Without a Box needs to get bigger to be at its best, so a week after its September show it holds auditions for new members. Eighteen students show up on a Saturday at Scripps’ Vita Nova Hall. Then that group is winnowed down to nine students invited for callbacks the next day.

Among the hopefuls is Pomona sophomore Zach Miller. In one exercise, he is asked to stand outside while Weinand, Eisenman and Roberts set up a scene with three of the students. Each is given a character feature. One is a ghost, another has a tail, and the third one’s foot is on fire. Miller comes back inside. His task: to guess what distinguishes each of the three, all of whom he is hosting at a party.

Miller is an agile performer. By the end of the scene, he has figured out each one’s crazy feature. Guessing the ghost mystery, he quips, “Say hi to Casper for me.”

Weinand says Without a Box selects performers based on their comedic abilities, physical skills, character range and “how well they keep scenes feeling real.”  The group also wants a diverse mix of students who are passionate about improv, he adds.

The Schumer Effect

Another aspiring member is Cassie Lewis, a junior at Claremont McKenna College whose parents are both Pomona alums (Kara Stuart Lewis ’88 and Gordon Lewis ’87). During a lunch break, she talks of how she discovered the edgy comedy of Amy Schumer over the summer, a revelation that has inspired her to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. Cassie, the vice president of CMC’s theater group Under the Lights, says she saw Without a Box perform a while ago and was “blown away by how they came up with really funny jokes.” So here she is, eager to become part of the group.

“You can’t be a comedian without doing improv,” she explains.

In one exercise during callbacks, Cassie plays off of Marisa Galvez, a CMC freshman. The setting for their scene is a motel continental breakfast. The two verbally spar as Lewis’s character steals apples and stuffs them into her pants.

Both young women are confident and creative. For most people, speaking off the cuff is daunting. A script provides a security blanket. Yet Lewis, Galvez and the others seem fearless, perfectly comfortable to perform without a net—or a box, if you will.

Galvez says she follows the motto of the improv company Upright Citizens Brigade: “Don’t think. Just act.”

Most of the students have previous experience with improv, evidence of its growing popularity. Many high schools now have improv teams or clubs. There are improv-based companies like The Second City, Upright Citizens Brigade and ComedySportz, and TV shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Stretching their improvisational muscles serves students well even beyond the stage. Morgan Blevins, a Harvey Mudd freshman who is a bright light at the callbacks, was on her high school’s improv team and says, “I’m so glad I did improv before I did my college interviews.”

Decision Time

A couple of days after callbacks, Without a Box taps its new members. Miller is selected, as is Lewis, Galvez and Blevins. Also chosen are Pomona sophomore Sean Gunther and Pitzer first-year Eli Fujita.

Miller says he’s excited about performing and “bringing the audience into the absurd scenes that we invent.”

Weinand, who has performed in Without a Box since his freshman year and will soon be applying to graduate schools, echoes the sentiment. “I love making people laugh,” he says. “That makes me really happy.”