One day during the winter of 2004, Jennifer Frazer logged on
to CNN.com to see what was happening in the world. A brief article about elk in
Wyoming dying
after eating poisonous lichen caught her eye. She was intrigued, both as a
graduate student in the MIT Program in Science Writing and as a self-proclaimed
nut about what she calls, “weird, cool living things.”
“Lichens meet my criteria,” says Frazer, who studied mycology at Cornell University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 2000 and a master’s degree in plant pathology two years later. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow. If I can only get a job in Wyoming!’”
After MIT, she did get a job in Wyoming–as the health and environment reporter for the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, the state’s second-largest newspaper. She was so busy covering everything from coal and gas development to meetings of local health boards that two years passed before she got around to writing about the elk. Her two-part series traced the efforts of wildlife scientists and game wardens to learn what was causing hundreds of the animals to die slow, painful deaths. The series won a 2007 award for excellence in science reporting from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One of the judges, Robert Lee Hotz of the Wall Street Journal, said Frazer “opens a window into the mysteries of field epidemiology, turning a story of doomed elk into a page-turner of a lethal botany and the consequences of ecology.”
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