Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Science reporting

Here in Washington, we wake up to WTOP, the local all-news station. This morning, substantially before I had my coffee, I thought I heard the mention of a new clinical study (I wont mention the results here) for which the conclusions sounded really hard to believe. Of course there was no context at all, no mention of where the study was published and therefore no chance of critically evaluating the conclusions.

This strikes me as emblematic of a huge problem in reporting on science–particularly in the context of health: pithy press-releases with a news hook trump any critical evaluation for many of the larger news outlets. It’s another version of “if it bleeds, it leads”.
The public health result is confusion. Folks on one day hear that they should consume more X to stay healthy longer. On another day, they hear that X causes cancer. They don’t know what to believe and the obvious contradictions create a credibility-gap for scientists.
This is why the profession of science-writing is so terribly important. The best science writers provide plenty of context, critical evaluation and even meta-analysis so that members of the public and decision makers get a real sense of what the sum-total of the data suggest.
We need more science writers and less press-releases.
Jim

Give them an inch….

From today’s SCIENCE magazine:

A frantic grant-writing effort that has consumed biomedical research scientists this spring came to an end last week, resulting in a huge pile of new applications—more than 10 times larger than expected—to be reviewed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After this enthusiastic response, there will be many disappointed applicants: The rejection rate could run as high as 98%.

Mason Commencement 2009

Tomorrow morning, I’ll get up early and drive from Arlington to the Fairfax campus. I’ll park at the Institute and walk across the Mason campus in my University of Michigan academic regalia –FYI the trademark “M” isn’t a part of the get up–to join with colleagues at the Patriot Center, putting a full stop on the academic year that began last August. Commencement paradoxically derives from the verb to commence, but ends the academic year rather than beginning it. To my mind, that’s because commencement exercises aren’t about the faculty or the deans, but rather about the graduating students, who now are about to commence their post-degree lives.

And that thought brings back the memory of an earlier commencement day in May of 1978 in the main quadrangle of Amherst College. On that day, long before there were such things as the Web or Iphones, it was hot and muggy, the sun shown bright. The black cap and gown was hot. As I recall, many of my fellow graduating seniors wore, additionally, the green, red and yellow arm band which protested apartheid in South Africa. The College President John William Ward had been arrested for protesting the Vietnam War at the local airbase; I vividly remember receiving my diploma from his hand under his stern New England gaze and then it was done–I was off to commence my own life, one that initially took me to Capitol Hill and later to graduate school in Ann Arbor–and finally here to Mason, where I’m completing my 11th academic year, and watching our graduating seniors commence their journey.
To all of them, good luck!
Jim

C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures–FT vs NPR

Somehow both the Financial Times and NPR’s Science Friday have both decided that it’s time to return to pondering C.P. Snow’s famous “Two Cultures” lecture in which he postulates a problematical divide between scientists and scholars in the humanities. Actually the occasion is the 50th anniversary of that seminal lecture. It’s never lost its relevance.

Jim