|
| Volume 50, Number 1, Winter 2000-2001 |
LOFTY IDEAL TO GRAND TRADITION: THE BIRTH OF THE NASW SCIENCE-IN-SOCIETY AWARDby Jerry E. Bishop The reporters honored in the lead story in this issue of ScienceWriters are probably unaware of it but they, as well as most other science writers, owe a debt to Donald Drake of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was 30 years ago that Don, as NASW president, conceived the Science-in-Society Award. The fact that the award not only has survived for three decades but also has become one of the highest professional honors that can be bestowed on a science writer argues well for Don's prescience. Thirty years ago science reporters were still enjoying the benefits of an almost insatiable public appetite for science news generated by the Sputnik and the race to the Moon. They also were enjoying a surfeit of ego-boosting awards for coverage of science and medicine.
At the time there was no award by a disinterested group, no Pulitzer category that recognized outstanding science reporting. So Don appointed a small committee of NASW members to dream up an award that science writers themselves could bestow. One thing Don wanted to avoid was an award for stories that adulated science. "Stories in those days tended to be more cheery about science than they are today," he said. "We would write about how great this new operation was but not about its impact on patients' lives." And none of the existing awards honored stories that played up the downside of science such as the ethical and societal problems it created. "We thought we needed a prize that recognized stories that were more creative, more probing and broader" than those recognized by the existing awards, he said.
This sounds high-minded in conception. But it wasn't easy to decide what constituted a story about the societal impact of science. Early in 1972, Audrey Likely, John Barbour, myself, and two others whose identities I can no longer remember, journeyed out to the far reaches of Long Island to Rosemary Arctander's house. She was the NASW executive secretary and had copies of the stories that had been entered for that first award. We knew we had to be careful in picking the first winner since the choice would set a precedent for the Science-in-Society Award for years to come. The first problem was that many of the entries were straightforward science or medical stories, some of them excellent and certainly deserving some kind of award-but not the one Don had in mind. But there were other, more onerous issues. The biggest was whether stories about the dangers of, say, pesticides or nuclear radiation or detergent run-off were examples of science's impact on society. After a couple of hours of debate, we decided that explaining the science of how pesticides, radiation or detergents did their damage to people or the environment was really straightforward public health or environmental reporting. Pesticides, nuclear fission, and detergents may have been products of science but so was electricity and the automobile, and writing about electrocutions or traffic deaths wasn't exactly the kind of story we were looking for. Equally onerous were medical stories. Almost any medical advance will have an impact on thousands of lives, but were stories recounting these wondrous advances really what the Science-in-Society Award was about? It took another two hours of arguing to decide that the answer was "no." Stories that only recounted the science of a medical advance didn't seem to require innovative thinking by the reporter. The afternoon was getting late, the pile of stories surviving these debates was getting pretty thin, and we were beginning to despair. Then we came to a series of Washington Post stories by Victor Cohn. They told how some well-meaning but overly enthusiastic researchers had started testing blood samples from African-Americans for sickle-cell trait in hopes of eliminating sickle-cell disease. They failed to tell either the patients or the public what they were doing or why. The ensuing uproar (some demagogues charged the whites were launching a program of genocide against the blacks) was so great the program had to be ended. The series was exactly the kind of innovative, probing reporting that went well beyond the science itself and into its social effects, the kind of story we felt Don Drake had in mind. The first Science-in-Society Award for reporting in the life sciences went to Vic. The other award, for reporting in the physical sciences, went to Robert Gillette of the news section of Science magazine. Unfortunately, my aging brain cannot remember his winning story and the NASW archives are at Cornell University, beyond my reach. But I'm sure it was equally impressive. Almost 30 years later many of the other awards have gone by the board, but the Science-in-Society Award survives as a high honor to excellence in science writing. Don Drake can be justly proud of his idea. Jerry E. Bishop is president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and the former science editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was a recipient of the Science-in-Society Award in 1986. |