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| Volume 49, Number 2, Summer 2000 |
by Joe Palca
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For example, the public consortium had set a target of 90 percent complete for attaining a "draft sequence," but it failed to reach that mark by June 26 when the officials made the announcement. Or perhaps the fact that the private consortium's claims of a complete sequence were hard to verify, since they were not publicly available, might have made a few people wonder about the line between praising an achievement and doing a little free PR for a private company.
Or maybe someone might have noticed that the event occurred on June 26 because that just happened to be a free date on the White House calendar, not because any scientific milestone had been reached. Basically, science reporters and their editors colluded with scientists to hype an inherently insignificant White House event into banner headlines, to wit: Genetic Code of Human Life Is Cracked by Scientists.
If you read the news coverage carefully, most of the annoying facts that detracted from the significance of the June 26 announcement did get mentioned. But taken as a whole, anyone who concluded from the news that the genome sequence was finally complete could hardly be faulted. What's more, although many reporters took pains to point out that the sequence data had been piling up in publicly accessible databases for years, and that many discoveries had already been made based on that data, the tone of the coverage seemed to imply that scientists finally had access to information they had long been denied.
Now before I go too far in all this, I must make a disclosure. My wife, Kathy Hudson, is director of the office of policy and public affairs at the National Human Genome Research Institute, the institute at the National Institutes of Health that runs the public genome project. For that reason, I have largely stopped covering genome-related activities. But my marriage does provide an interesting vantage point for observing the complicated dance between science journalists and scientists.
In a way, any date chosen to declare completion of the human genome sequence would have been somewhat arbitrary-it hardly matters whether it was the day a "T" was read off a sequencing machine at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge or a "C" from an identical Celera machine in Rockville. And I'm not trying to suggest that completing the genome was not an event worth covering. My point here is to highlight the dilemma science writers constantly face in trying to sound timely and significant. It is the rare science story that is both intrinsically important and immediate enough to demand news coverage. The science story that fulfills one criterion often falls down on the other.
For example, the Pathfinder landing on Mars was clearly news. Seeing pictures from the surface of another planet was quite compelling. But the science in the first few days following landing was negligible, and that's when the news coverage was greatest. Much of that early coverage (including mine, I admit), implied that the results from Pathfinder were likely to change our view of Mars, something I think we all knew was a bit of an overstatement.
In the case of the genome sequence, every single story written about the significance of the June 26 announcement could have been written months earlier (or months later, for that matter) without risk of betraying the media's commitment to inform the public.
Simplify and exaggerate, a colleague once told me, was his mantra for how to tell science stories. I know he meant it as a joke, but there's an unnerving element of truth to that phrase. I agree that the best science story ever written is worthless if it doesn't get published/broadcast, so if you have to make something sound a teensy bit more important than you really believe it is, well, so be it. But I wonder if we don't set up false expectations for what scientists can accomplish if we insist that every story imply more than the science is really capable of delivering.
It may be impossible, given the nature of our business, to stop adding that note of urgency and importance to science news coverage, but I think it's worth a try. It's time to start being honest about the nature of science: much of it is interesting and may ultimately change the way we look at the world in which we live. But little of it is truly newsworthy.
Joe Palca is currently a Kaiser Media Fellow on leave from National Public Radio. He can be reached by phone at 202-244-5693, fax 815-371-1658, or e-mail jpalca@npr.org.