Pam Belluck

Belluck joined The Times’s science department in 2009 after more than a decade as a New York Times national bureau chief, leading the paper's Midwest and New England bureaus. She often investigates complex or controversial subjects, including gene editing, reproductive health, infectious disease, and mental illness.

Her work launched the Times's Vanishing Minds series, for which she traveled to mountain villages in Colombia to write about the world's largest family to experience Alzheimer's, to South Korea to write about innovative dementia care, and to a California men's prison where first-degree murderers care for inmates with dementia. Her two-part series Mother’s Mind showed, through months of sensitive, difficult reporting, that maternal mental illness is much more common and varied than previously thought, and that health providers should be better at detecting trouble and ensuring women receive help. It has helped spur efforts to screen women for maternal depression and assist them in getting treatment.

A three-month investigation by Belluck found that morning-after pills do not induce abortions, contrary to claims by some anti-abortion activists. Another investigative scoop revealed a prominent American scientist's interaction with the Chinese researcher whose highly controversial experiment produced the world's first gene-edited babies. Other groundbreaking stories have focused on people with severe mental illness obtaining psychiatric advance directives and a scientist whose baby has a rare, devastating mutation on the very gene the scientist studies.

She has also written about offbeat topics: the sexism of office air conditioning systems, custom-fit condoms, floating islands, the world’s oldest shoe, and the place with the longest name in America: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. Her story about a lost cat that somehow navigated 200 miles home inspired someone to write a children’s book. Belluck also contributes to multimedia, video and podcast projects for The New York Times.

Her reporting about scientists using their children as research subjects that was chosen for The Best American Science Writing, and one of the only sports stories she’s ever written (about fish shooting in Vermont) was somehow picked for The Best American Sports Writing.

Belluck is the author of the non-fiction book Island Practice, published in June 2012 by PublicAffairs.[1] The book is a true tale about a colorful and contrarian doctor on Nantucket who has performed surgery with scalpels he carved from obsidian, made house calls to a hermit who lived in an underground house and a vine igloo, treated patients ranging from Kennedy relatives to a sheep with a prolapsed uterus, and diagnosed everything from tularemia to toe-tourniquet syndrome. In July 2012, Imagine Entertainment optioned the book to develop a TV series with 20th Century Fox Television, and in August 2012 the medical drama was bought by CBS.[2] In 2014, the book was optioned for television by Original Film and CBS.