Novels About Scientists Highlight Passion and (Sometimes) Failure

By Elsa Partan

Published December 26, 2017 at 12:03 PM EST

If you’ve never heard of the LabLit genre, you’re not alone. Cell biologist and author Jenny Rohn went looking for novels about scientists and discovered there were only a couple hundred such books in existence. She now tracks fictional portrayals of scientists on her webzine LabLit.com, and she runs through some of this year’s best on Living Lab Radio.

Living Lab Radio on CAI

Elsa Partan

Elsa Partan is a producer and newscaster with CAI. She first came to the station in 2002 as an intern and fell in love with radio. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. From 2006 to 2009, she covered the state of Wyoming for the NPR member station Wyoming Public Media in Laramie. She was a newspaper reporter at The Mashpee Enterprise from 2010 to 2013. She lives in Falmouth with her husband and two daughters.

See stories by Elsa Partan