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Abstract
Journalists can derive a number of professional and personal benefits from attending scientific meetings. But while some scientists welcome the opportunity to explain their research to the press, others fear a loss of credibility or standing from premature publication. Here, an account of the pleasures and perils of tracking down news where the newsmakers meet.
A New York Times story in October 1997 hailed the creation of genetically engineered mice that mimic the human disease sickle cell anemia. Science, the journal publishing the studies of the mice, also trumpeted the advance in its own article. Hot news, right? Not really. After hearing a presentation on the mice at a human genetics meeting, I had written essentially the same story a year earlier in Science News.
This anecdote isn't meant to be boastful, but rather to illustrate one of
the many reasons why journalists cover scientific meetings. While the
motivations seem obvious, many scientists attending a conference are still
surprised, confused, threatened, and even angry when they discover a
reporter in their midst.
Though some scientists actively seek publicity at research meetings by holding press conferences or issuing press releases, most others assume that research conferences are closed affairs, and that journalists shouldn't report on preliminary data not yet subjected to peer review. Indeed, when I covered last summer's International Congress of Developmental Biology, a public meeting attended by more than a thousand scientists, several sought to discourage me and other reporters from writing about work presented in talks or posters.
Such confrontations are prompted largely by professional fear: scientists worry that major journals will reject their work if it has already hit the newspapers or general magazines. For at least one journal, Cell, the concern seems legitimate. In 1996, Cell threatened to pull a paper reporting the discovery of a cancer gene if one of the authors presented the data at a major cancer conference held a few weeks before the paper's scheduled publication. In the clinical arena, the New England Journal of Medicine has also always had a strict (and controversial) policy of not even considering submitted manuscripts if the results discussed in the paper have received any previous news coverage.
In contrast, Science, Nature,
and most other journals maintain that prior publicity will not affect their
publication decisions so long as the researchers did not actively seek or
encourage the media's interest. Many investigators still hesitate to believe
that policy. In fact, one of my colleagues has had to combat that
misconception so often that she usually carries to meetings a folder of
Science and Nature papers that had received meeting coverage
by the media before their publication.
Why do journalists cover scientific meetings? On a personal level, it's often a joy to escape from one's journal-cluttered office, and to see that the voices we hear on the phone are actually attached to bodies. Face-to-face contact solidifies carefully cultivated sources and leads to new ones. Scientists are much more willing to spend time explaining a concept to someone with whom they've had a beer or coffee.
A second impetus for meeting coverage is the almighty scoop. It is in and around the crowded meeting halls that journalists can unearth stories, trends, and controversies that may take months, if ever, to show up in the journals.
Much as scientists race to clone a gene, many publications place a priority
on delivering information before their competitors. Yet when major journals
publish a newsworthy scientific discovery, they feed every media
organization the information at the same time. In contrast, by attending the
developmental biology meeting, I and two other journalists learned of a
major story - the possible isolation of human embryonic stem cells - months
before it would ever reach a journal.
Some scientists argue that journalists shouldn't cover meetings because the information presented is preliminary and may not survive the scrutiny of a peer-reviewed journal. The human embryonic stem cells may ultimately not pass muster, for example.
This is true enough. Data and conclusions presented at a meeting will frequently prove incorrect in the long run. Yet that's largely irrelevant to whether they are newsworthy. The journalist must simply take extra care to report any caveats associated with the work and to not exaggerate its impact.
In any case, a journal's peer review offers no absolute guarantee of
quality. How many conclusions from peer-reviewed articles prove out 10 years
down the road? Consider BRCA1, the breast cancer gene. After its discovery
several years ago, three published reports offered starkly different
conclusions as to the cellular location of the gene's protein. Two of the
papers even prompted feature articles in the New York Times (in which
the second article curiously ignored the earlier story). Yet only one of the
published papers can be right.
Another difficult choice occasionally faced by journalists is whether to report newsworthy information from a meeting that they did not attend. A reporter can usually make up for the absence by interviewing the scientists who presented new data at the meeting, but researchers are sometimes reluctant to help.
Last April, investigators attending a major cancer conference offered the
first description of telomerase knockout mice, work that appeared to cast
doubt on telomerase inhibition as a cancer treatment. Six months went by
before that data appeared in Cell. Even then, apparently hoping to
publish more papers on the mice, the research group didn't report all the
information presented at the meeting, and politely refused to discuss the
additional data with reporters. Yet other scientists in the field freely shared that
unreported data, asserting that it was vital to properly interpret whether
the mice offered any lessons about human cancer. Consequently, journalists
faced a dilemma: write an incomplete story about the limited data in the
Cell paper, or tell a better story using unpublished information
widely known to the scientific community.
In the end, the problems between scientists and the media concerning meeting coverage stem from the two camps' conflicting interests. Most scientists are pleased at media attention so long as it doesn't jeopardize their professional currency, the published paper. As for journalists, we have no desire to slow a scientist's climb up the career ladder, but we don't feel that scientific journals should hold absolute control over when newsworthy information goes public.
As long as journals are middlemen, this conflict may be unavoidable. Scientists should keep two things in mind. One, almost all scientific meeting are open to the press, so assume we're there and listening. Two, it's extraordinarily rare that good, interesting science is denied publication as a result of previous news coverage - and in those cases, though I admit some bias, I hold journals at fault, not the journalists. See you at the next meeting.
John Travis covers biology and biomedical research for the weekly magazine Science News.
Endlinks
Press Gag Rules at AIDS Conference - describes the hurdles facing journalists at the Third Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. From the February 1996 issue of the AIDS Treatment News.
Scientists Can Help Keep the Media's Take on Research Closer to Reality - uses examples from the popular press and scientific journals to underscore the need for close communication between scientists and journalists. From the November 25, 1996 issue of The Scientist.
SciNews-MedNews - provides almost daily releases of scientific stories and the Newswise Calendar of Medical Meetings. Access to certain (often embargoed) information and search tools is limited to reporters. From Newswise.
Dealings With the Media - a briefing from the European Federation of Biotechnology Task Group on Public Perceptions of Biotechnology. How researchers in biotechnology can deal with journalists.
Medical Scientists and Health News Reporting: A Case of Miscommunication - discusses the shortcomings of both scientists and journalists in their attempts to inform the public and provides advice on how to communicate scientific research more effectively. From the June 15, 1997 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.
