Scientists Can Help Keep The Media's Take On Research Closer To Reality

Being both a scientist by training and a journalist by practice gives one a unique perspective on the challenges of conveying science news to the public. Scientists can help writers and editors do their jobs without reducing every discovery to a potential cure for birth defects or cancer by learning to explain what they do, and how and why they do it, with both eloquence and excitement. A love of basic research drove me to both science and journalism. However, I left science shortly after earning my Ph.D. in genetics because I didn't think the world could ever have use for flies that had legs growing out of their heads. Ironically, my impatience with basic research led to a career in explaining it. Illustration: John Overmyer In graduate school at Indiana University from 1976 to 1980, I was at the end of an era, using classical techniques rather than molecular biology to analyze the Antennapedia complex of homeotic mutants in Drosophila melanogaster-the flies with legs on their heads. A graduate science journalism course and a stint on the student newspaper won me over to a writing career, and I left the flies to the base-sequencers. The homeotics were quirks of flies, so I thought. I never imagined that a piece of DNA in all those weird flies-the homeobox sequence-would turn up in a Noah's ark of organisms, including chickens, worms and insects galore, cows, frogs, hydra, lampreys, mice, quails, rats, sea urchins, squid, and zebrafish. Abnormal homeoboxes also lie behind a growing list of human ills, including leukemia, cleft palate, lack of teeth and irises, and several rare, inherited conditions. I was thrilled when the 1995 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to three leaders in homeotic research: Edward Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, and Eric Wieschaus. Wieschaus told the press that their work would not have been possible without support for basic research that had no clear, immediate utility. While my former colleagues were discovering the universal importance of homeotic genes, I became an assistant professor in zoology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I also entered the world of freelance journalism, trying to convince editors that my article ideas were sound and ahead of their time. I quickly found that what excites the scientifically trained is not what excites "women's" and consumer magazine editors. Consider a few ideas that editors rejected or even ridiculed: 1980: A seminar by Barnett Rosenberg, a physics professor at the University of Chicago, caused my brain to register "story idea." Rosenberg had observed that bacteria cease dividing in an electromagnetic field and traced the mitotic block to platinum in the electrodes. Could platinum also stop cancer cells from dividing? Editors thought it was an insane idea. Cisplatin went on to become the top-selling cancer chemotherapeutic. 1983: A student in my human genetics course at Miami became a graduate student on the team that discovered the Huntington's disease (HD) marker. On a muggy May day in 1983, she called me in great excitement. She was the one sitting at the computer who had realized the team had identified a genetic marker for HD, ushering in the era of presymptomatic diagnosis. "Story idea" virtually exploded in my brain. I sent the idea to several health magazines-and got no takers. 1985: I noticed small news items in Science and Nature describing a way to use the DNA replication process to mass-produce selected segments of DNA. I was tremendously excited, and immediately queried the several medical business magazines I was writing for at the time. The idea was, of course, to explain the great potential of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Again, no interest. Too esoteric. I papered a file cabinet with rejection slips. When I managed to convince an editor at Woman's World that folic acid deficiency was linked to birth defects and wrote a small article, I found that on the galley proofs, she had changed "neural tube defects" to "neural tooth defects." Was this a new kind of homeotic mutation? Clearly, I was dealing with the wrong publications. Editors at science magazines-Discover, BioScience, High Technology, and Genetic Engineering News-thrived on reporting new research results, and I was much happier writing for them. By the late 1980s, I was also writing my first textbook, a great joy because biology professors love and appreciate explanations of research. But I have continued to track the ways that the popular media report basic research and interpret its value. Scientists can get clues to improving their communication skills with the media by noting what editors choose to cover, what they dismiss as uninteresting, and, more subtly, how they sometimesfail to make connections or provide perspective. Several stories this past August revealed just how much journalists can be out of sync with scientists. The Aug. 9, 1996, issue of People magazine reported the tale of Deborah Zimmerman, a Racine, Wis., waitress who tried to drink herself to death just before giving birth. In the hospital, she tore fetal monitors from her abdomen, shrieking, "If you don't keep me here, I'm just going to go home and keep drinking and drink myself to death. And I'm going to kill this thing because I don't want it anyways." She was charged with attempted murder, which made many women who heard about the case wonder if they could be prosecuted for drinking alcohol before they knew they were pregnant, or having a glass of wine now and then while pregnant. I am one of the few individuals on the planet who reads both Science and People, and that week, I noted related reports in the two publications. An article in Science discussed a study described at the joint scientific meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism and the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism held in Washington, D.C., June 22 to 27 (S. Braun, Science, 273 :738-9, 1996). Michael Charness and colleagues at Harvard Medical School showed that alcohol at the level of legal intoxication prevents rat brain neurons growing in culture from forming connections owing to poor cell adhesion. Although more studies are required, the implication is that a woman needn't drink herself nearly to death to harm a fetus. This report somehow didn't make it into the news, yet it added important perspective to People's drunk waitress tale. At most times of the year, the sequencing of the genome of a third form of life (in addition to prokaryotes and eukaryotes) on Earth would be big news. But Methanococcus jannaschii debuted in the pages of Science on August 23 (C. Bult et al., Science, 273 :1058-73, 1996), a week after publication of an article with the sexy title. "Search for past life on Mars: possible relic biogenic activity in Martian meteorite ALH84001" (D. McKay et al., Science, 273 :924-9, 1996). It was midsummer, time of the annual Perseid meteor shower, and people wanted some excitement in the news. The ancient Archaea hadn't a chance. The Martians made the headlines, while the third form of life right here on Earth, if mentioned at all, was buried in the back pages. Yet the Martian "life" was hardly triple-eyed green hominoids. The evidence was strange-looking chemical deposits, described as "carbonate globules" and "ovoids," that consisted of magnetite and iron sulfide crystals, and unusual combinations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These features could have come from ancient Martian unicellular life-or from nonliving chemical processes. The researchers were careful to qualify their conclusions: "The carbonate globules are similar in texture and size to some terrestrial bacterially induced carbonate precipitates." I couldn't help contrasting the tentativeness of the Martian work to the thorough analysis of the archaeon sequencing, although I realize that such a comparison is of the apples-to-oranges variety and, as a geneticist, I'm a bit prejudiced. Yet the sequencing work overlapped and assembled 36,718 pieces of approximately 481 bases each, then compared the 1738 archaeon genes with known genes in the other two forms of life. Astoundingly, 56 percent of the archaeon genes are unknown! Why hunt for Martians when we are still discovering new forms of life right here on Earth? So much for recent books that claim we are nearing a point at which we will know all there is to know of the natural world. Scientific journals and magazines connected the Martian and archaeon stories immediately. Scientific American had several excellent articles linking microbes living in extreme habitats on earth to microbes living extraterrestrially. But most popular media reports didn't see the archaea for the Martians. Straddling the worlds of science and journalism can be difficult. Most often I see things as scientists do, but sometimes the journalist in me predominates. So it was for a one-page "Scientific Correspondence" in the August 22 issue of Nature. The article was destined for "The Oprah Winfrey Show" by virtue of its title alone: "Brain cannabinoids in chocolate" (E. di Tomaso et al., 382 :677-8, 1996). Here, finally, was basic research of general interest. The researchers, from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, began by stating the problem: We in Western societies crave chocolate, but we don't know why. The researchers proposed that the craving involves "sensory components of the nervous system." They also pointed out that chocolate craving can be associated with "drug-induced psychoses" and used a battery of analytical chemistry techniques to identify "pharmacological constituents of chocolate" that bind cannabinoid receptors. The high-affinity binding "mimics psychoactive effects of plant-derived cannabinoid drugs." The work was well done and I feel bad poking fun at it, but as an inquisitive journalist and admitted chocolate addict, I can't help it. I have questions: Can one become addicted to chocolate, and if so, will the Food and Drug Administration some day regulate M&Ms? Do people who smoked pot in college years ago today crave Hershey bars? Is this true even if they didn't inhale? Does chocolate come from carbonate globules on Mars? Maybe we have discovered the origin of Mars Bars. The lesson from this summer's missed and misconstrued science stories is straightforward. Scientists should be available to journalists. When giving interviews, researchers should convey the knowledge that their work has uncovered, describe how they discovered it, and include background on how the work fits into the particular field. If a scientist can carefully and accurately weave the relevancy of the work into the fabric of the interview, and make connections for a journalist, the media's take on the research may be closer to reality. Ricki Lewis is the author of college textbooks in general biology, human genetics, and anatomy and physiology and is a contributing editor to The Scientist. This article is based on a talk given at the National Association of Biology Teachers annual meeting in Charlotte, N.C., on October 19.

Scientists Can Help Keep The Media's Take On Research Closer To Reality

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Ricki Lewis

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November 1996

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