The route to a medical writing and editing career so often is circuitous. For many, it is a career happened upon, when you're the scientist who seems to have a knack for language or the writer who isn't scared off by science.
Art Gertel described his own roundabout journey in a lively talk Friday night that touched on tarot card readings (a hobby), piracy (on stage and screen), soccer (a lifelong love), and ghosts (of the haunted house and scientific manuscript persuasion).
Gertel, who was president of AMWA in 1998 and remains a very active volunteer, is this year's winner of AMWA's Harold Swanberg Distinguished Service Award for distinguished contributions to medical communication and the medical profession. He is currently vice president of strategic regulatory, medical writing and quality assurance at Beardsworth Consulting Group.
The prize for winning the Swanberg Award? The opportunity to contribute more to the profession by giving a speech at the awards dinner. He titled his speech "Of Pirates, Ghosts, and the Fool -- Stumbling Toward a Unified Theory of Medical Writing."
At first in life, he said he wanted to be a cowboy, but that was back in pre-school. In junior high, the pirating life captured his imagination, but that too didn't seem the most viable career path. But his 8th grade class production of Pirates of Penzance did give him early exposure to multitasking. He played a policeman and a pirate, and was the chief lighting technician and first trumpet in the orchestra.
"That was a little challenging," he said. "But so is medical writing." Medical writers often have to play many roles -- scientists, data interpreters, editors, project managers, and diplomats, he noted. And though his pirating interest in itself hasn't paid the bills, it has united him in levity with other AMWA members who apparently also inhabit the organization's pirate subculture. AMWA is unusual as a professional association in fostering that lighter, more personal side. Here, he said, you can learn about each other as whole human beings.
His lifelong love of soccer also laid the foundation for his career. In soccer, he said, "you are trained to give away the chance of stardom...It benefits the whole team." So too with medical writing. "You are distributing the opportunities to your teammates," he said.
After graduate school and work as a bench scientist, he transitioned into medical writing when people started noticing that his lab reports were well-written. He joined AMWA in 1979 and continued on the medical writing path.
Of ghosts, he said, he believed a 1773 farmhouse of his was haunted, and famously so, having been written up in book chapters and newspapers. But regarding a belief in ghostwriters, he said: "That's not us."
Professional medical writers need to become our own best advocates to family, friends, and the world beyond, to explain what professionally trained, ethical medical writers do, he said. Furthermore, we should work hard internationally on medical writing issues. "Our profession is global," he said. He encouraged AMWA members to volunteer to advance the cause of the profession.
Referencing "the fool" from his title's talk, he explained that in tarot cards, the fool card has the 0 symbol on it, a circle with no end. Like the fool, you end up at the end of a journey, but there is no end. "The end is the beginning. The past is prologue."
So be sure to look for him to continue on to the next stage of his career as a cowboy.
--Victoria White
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