Pause for reflection

Why such relentless phreneticism? Why, when the media consider a piece of science to be of public interest, do they invariably splash it as news for immediate consumption? Why so little insight, so few reflective or truly helpful feature articles after a pause for thought? One answer is that, along with novelty, we all need topicality (real or apparent) to attract our attention to a news story. Few readers would be gripped by a story beginning “Incremental progress is gradually being made in understanding the behaviour of electrons.” Yet there are also occasions when thoughtful, well-informed articles days, weeks or even months later would better serve the public interest than instant screamers. A recent issue (October 1997) of The Sciences, the popular science magazine published by the New York Academy of Sciences, illustrates the point well. It presents a calm, considered review of “the promise and peril of cloning” from several different perspectives. It was triggered by the announcement of the birth almost a year ago of Dolly, the first viable lamb to be derived from an adult somatic cell (Wilmut et al., Nature 1997, 385:810-815). No matter that it took several months to appear. The editor of The Sciences was untroubled by a printing schedule that did not allow him to compete with last March’s sensationalism and instantaneous demands for bans on human cloning. He assumed readers would appreciate a more authoritative clutch of articles on all aspects of cloning, even if they had to wait for them. Compare this with newspapers that give us something different to be excited or worried about every week (sometimes every day), with no follow-up or recapitulation, no sober assessment, nothing to indicate whether the disaster happened or the holy grail was discovered. Last October, on successive weekends, The Sunday Times announced grave news about breast cancer, headless frogs created in Bath, UK, and human head transplantation in the USA, with varying degrees of justification. The first story, under the headline “HRT link to breast cancer proved”, claimed that some groups of women receiving hormone replacement therapy were 2.3 times more likely than untreated women to develop the disease. The research paper from which this came actually showed a relative risk of 1.023.