(Reprinted with permission from Current Biology.
Vol. 8, p. R36)

Why such relentless freneticism? 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 behavior 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. [1]

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.

In October 1997, on successive weekends, The Sunday Times announced grave news about breast cancer; headless frogs created in Bath, United Kingdom; and human head transplantation in the United States, 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.

The headless frogs were in fact tadpoles, of a type which had been produced previously in laboratories all over the world by surgical and chemical techniques. The head transplants were conducted in primates by the controversial neurosurgeon Robert White, who believes that his work may in time help human patients with severe spinal injury. The Sunday Times first reported White's work in December 1972 and it has since surfaced on rare occasions, there and elsewhere.

Indeed, the major criticism of the October sequence of stories is that each was a one-day sensation, disappearing virtually without trace. Readers made anxious by the HRT article, for example, must have sought in vain for further explanation in subsequent issues of the newspaper. Some will have found it, after an unnecessary delay of more than a month, in a cursory note stating that the figure of 2.3 was wrong (but not giving the true one). The original story appeared prominently on page 1, the correction at the bottom of a single column on the back page.

It's instructive to contrast the staccato delivery of sensations and breakthroughs, apparently lacking both context and consequence, with the more relaxed approach of The Sciences. First, the magazine realized that "contrary to popular impression, Dolly did not spring fully grown from Ian Wilmut's ingenuity." They commissioned John Gurdon - who reported the cloning of frogs from skin cells 22 years ago - to set Dolly in her proper historical context. The result is an elegant essay which takes nothing away from the Roslin Institute work, and indeed highlights the importance of this strand of research.

Second, the magazine brought together a collation of views on cloning (what it does and does not mean), human identity, and asexual reproduction, which reflect considered rumination rather than instantaneous punditry. By comparison, the Daily Mail's efforts to deal with the profundities of biology last March ("Could we now raise the dead?") seem as gauche as the tabloids' clamor at that time for the cloning of soccer player Paul Gascoigne.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, The Sciences has portrayed the work of Ian Wilmut and his colleagues in an appropriately rich and illuminating context. Stephen Jay Gould discusses genetic distinctiveness in relation to Siamese twins. Physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer writes of new states of matter "formed from particles more alike than any clone." A film critic asks whether movies about cloning have prepared us for the real thing. And Burkhard Bilger shows how "moral relativism and news of practical benefits are nudging human cloning towards public acceptance, even as the first laws are written to ban it."

There may be those who crave the instant gratification of a sensation a day over the cornflakes. Most would prefer more nourishing fare later.

Project for Excellence in Journalism - initiative by the Committee of Concerned Journalists from various media to raise the standards of American journalism. Site sections include The Project; Local TV; Newspapers; What's Ahead; and contact information. Affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Earthshaking Story! Film at Eleven! - article on two seismologists' experiences, good and bad, with media coverage of earthquakes and seismology.

Scientists and Journalists Are Worlds Apart: Survey - the results of a survey taken by the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, indicating, among other things, that most scientists believe the news media prefer sensationalism over fact.