Sington, David

views updated

SINGTON, David

PERSONAL: Male. Education: Trinity College, Cambridge, B.S., 1981.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Princeton University Press, 41 William St., Princeton, NJ 08540. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Science journalist and documentary filmmaker; BBC Television, senior producer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, American Geophysical Union, for television series Earth Story, 1999; Sigma XI, The Scientific Research Society, honorary member, 2000.

WRITINGS:

BOOKS

(With Simon Lamb) Earth Story: The Shaping of Our World, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1998.

Also wrote and produced three documentary films, including Traces of Guilt, The Man Who Made up His Mind, and The Man Who Moved the Mountains; and wrote and produced Earth Story (an eight part television series), BBC (England), 1998.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A follow-up television series for the BBC.

SIDELIGHTS: Science writer David Sington is the first non-American and the first broadcast journalist to win the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, which he received in 1999 for his television series Earth Story. Sington, who graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1981 with a degree in natural sciences, began his career in 1983 writing science programs for radio. He later joined BBC-TV, where he worked in production and eventually became senior producer. Among his respected documentary films are Traces of Guilt, which explores the use of science in criminal detective work; The Man Who Made up His Mind, which traces Gerald Edelman's theory of the brain; and The Man Who Moved the Mountains, which examines the life and thought of a New Zealand geologist who developed an innovative theory of earthquakes.

For his eight-part television series Earth Story, which took thirty months to film, Sington traveled across the globe to focus on sites pertinent to the program's exploration of earth processes. The first episode introduces the concept of geologic time and shows how geologists obtain data from rocks that provide information about the past. The next episodes provide more detail on plate tectonics, mantle convection, and the behavior of the earth's crust. The series then goes on to show how these processes have affected the earth's climate and evolution.

The American Geophysical Union honored Earth Story as a work that "makes geophysical science accessible and interesting to the general public" when it bestowed upon Sington its Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism in 1999. The identically titled companion book to the series, which Sington co-wrote with Simon Lamb, also impressed readers with its detailed information and engaging style. Among the book's more interesting themes is its explanation of how earth features that appear to be distinct, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, glaciers, and weather, are actually related parts of one complex interlinked system. The book also argues that geological activity was a precondition for the development of life, and that life on earth has seriously affected the earth's geological activity. Reviewers admired Earth Story's lucidity, organization, and vivid prose. Booklist's Gilbert Taylor commended the book as "a splendidly concise presentation of how plate tectonics became the orthodox theory that explained a lengthy portion of the earth's history." A Publishers Weekly reviewer deemed it a "compelling and accessible account [that] merits sustained attention." Sington planned a follow-up series to Earth Story for the BBC.