Art Gertel, Swanberg Award winner: Of pirates, ghosts, and the fool

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.

AMWA Journal editor wins President's Award

2008-09 AMWA President Cindy Hamilton awarded a genuinely surprised Lori Alexander the President's Award at tonight's Sablack awards dinner. The President's Award is given to a person who has been a member of AMWA for at least 10 years, has made distinctive contributions to the association at either the chapter or national level, and has not served on the Executive Committee. In addition to being the editor of the AMWA Journal, Lori is a past president of the Florida Chapter, has planned numerous chapter conferences, served on a variety of committees, and taught workshops.

UPDATE: There were many other important awards given out at this conference. Hope to add more later. --Victoria White

A visionary keynote address

Dr. Karen Woolley is the first AMWA keynote speaker in my experience who is one of us--a medical writer. And what a medical writer she is! In addition to running a large medical writing firm based in Australia, she is internationally engaged in advancing our profession through teaching, research, and advocacy for higher educational and ethical standards.

In her talk Thursday, Karen outlined 3 major problems facing medical writers, especially those of us who work on journal manuscripts:

• Lack of evidence that we add value to our projects and are ethical
• Lack of a truly international approach to training
• Isolation from other stakeholders, particularly journal editors

For each problem, she suggested actions that the profession can take and actions that individual members can take.

To address the first problem, Karen urged members to compete for the new award AMWA created for original research by AMWA members. The research must explore the value added by medical writers and editors and must be published in a peer-reviewed journal indexed by PubMed. The winner will receive a $2000 honorarium. (For more information, look under "What's New?" on the AMWA home page.) Aside from competing for that award and the new student research award, individuals can help by learning the rules of medical publishing, especially the AMWA Position Statement, Good Publication Practice for Pharmaceutical Companies (soon to be updated), and the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts.

Even more emphatically, Karen called on us to reject ghostwriting assignments, because short-term financial gain for individuals is creating long-term professional pain for everyone in the profession. “That has got to stop,” she said. She urged us to use the PLoS Medicine checklist to document the specifics of our collaborations with authors.

As part of formal research, Karen and colleagues have investigated manuscript retraction rates to identify contributing factors. They presented some of this research at last month’s 6th International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication. One critical issue, Karen believes, is lack of training in medical writing. Effective training needs to be available globally, given that clinical trials are booming in sites such as China and India.