In response to a blog entry of mine about the threat that militant atheism poses to science through its inherent illogicality, Mike Dunford wrote this thoughtful essay. Not only did this attract a lot more comments than my own post (Just What Is It That Makes Today’s ScienceBlogs So Different, So Appealing?) but it raised another problem that all scientists face – getting their message across to the public. Some commentators thought (as I do) that militant atheism is, in part, an expression of the frustration that some scientists feel at how difficult this transference is – a reaction, possibly, to the anti-scientific religious fundamentalism that seems to have been on the increase in recent years.

But in this thread I think I have spotted something closer to home. A more practical problem: something we should all be able to do something about.

Let’s think of the dissemination of science as a process. How do those breathtaking discoveries (here at Nature, ‘breakthrough’ is a banned word) get from the lab bench to the breakfast table? Think of it, perhaps, as a cell-signalling pathway (oh, do I SO-O-O know your comfort zone).

Scientists (all alleles of the dysfunctional locus) make a discovery, which they signal to a journal in the form of a paper. This triggers the canonical release of calcium from intracellular stores (why, oh why, does it always come down to the release of calcium from intracellular stores? Doesn’t anything else ever happen? Why is it all so boring? How do I work this? Is this not my beautiful home? Are We Not Men?), or, in this analogy, the alerting of the press offices in the scientists’ own university and/or the journal itself.

Proximately, the archival matter of the science is transcribed in a variably error-prone fashion into smaller, more easily digestible segments or press releases, which are then translated into news reports, in a tissue-dependent way; anything from thoughtful op-eds in The New York Times (The Calcium from The Cells Within) to breezy slots on daytime TV (Get That Summer Look—How Calcium Can Pep-Up Your Beauty Routine And Help You Squeeze Into That Itsy-Bisty Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini) until, ultimately, the substance of the discovery reaches the audience.

Now, there are two steps in this process which have not, I think, attracted sufficient attention in the agonized debates about how best to communicate science to the public, for all that both steps are absolutely vital. The first step is mentioned in the above process-based scenario (jargon – don’cha just love it?) But the second, even more important, is not mentioned at all.

Now, a warning – what follows is very likely to offend a lot of people. But in the words of Maximus, Commander of the Legions of the North, Husband of a Murdered Wife, Father of a Murdered Son, Servant of the True Emperor, Goat with a Thousand Young, Winner of the Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work,—you’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.

The first rate-limiting step in the science dissemination process is the press office. Time was when scientists had no press offices, and communicated in faltering fashion directly with journalists. These days, scientists tend to communicate their work through press offices, either in their own institutions, or in the journals themselves, or both. This, I must emphasize, is a Good Thing. A good press officer is like a good agent – they will know the market, and will know how best to maximize the impact of the scientists’ work.

The problem, in my experience, is an attitude that whereas it might take years of training and a certain skill to write a scientific paper, any half-baked twit can write a press release, irrespective of experience. Writing press releases is often delegated to the most junior member of staff, when crafting an effective press release is extremely hard, requires a certain authorial skill and, if it is about science, the scientific knowledge equal to that of any science journalist.

I know this from experience. For about ten years I wrote Nature’s press release, and I like to think I made a good job of it (an unintended byproduct was my reintroduction, single-handed, of the words eldritch and chthonic into the English language). It was a day’s solid hard work, and involved getting my head round everything from AIDS to exploding galaxies and all points between. But it was decided that writing a press release was Beneath Me as an Editor, so the work was given to—I have to say—people with not much experience of either science or writing, who were encouraged to ‘have a go’, as if writing a press release was as easy as the nursery slopes, when a badly-crafted example can be as damaging as a firework carelessly thrown into a chicken coop (it’s different now, I am pleased to say, and Nature’s PR department is as hard-nosed and professional as anything you’ll see anywhere).

Historically, PR people were called Araminta Chumleigh-Horseposture and only worked in PR because Daddy didn’t have the right connections to get them into art galleries where they might meet suitable husbands. Science for these people began and ended with the gobbledegook in commercials for beauty products (cue JENNIFER ANISTON: “listen carefully now, here’s the science part”.) Things are different now, thankfully, but PR still, even now, has that scent of posh-tottiness. The solution, I think, is that scientists must work more closely with PR people; demand that their PRs have some training in science; and view PR as a professional career option with more validity than a place to park debutantes. Initiatives such as Master’s Degrees in Science Communication have, in the past decade or so, begun to make a difference. There are still a few gaffes (I remember a press release from a prominent journal – not Nature – referring to a geological epoch as the ‘Crustaceous Period’) but the craft of writing a science press release is beginning to be accorded the respect it deserves.

And now, to the part of the process that Dare Not Speak Its Name. The PR has arranged the interviews, and the science writers have filed their copy. But all roads lead to the News Editor, the sphincter (excuse me, I meant to write ‘gate keeper’) through which all news must pass before it finally gets to the viewer, listener or reader.

My beef – and it has been for years – is that news editors rarely have any training in science, having, more likely, come from a general journalism background, or one which favours the arts and humanities. As a result, they tend to regard science as a specialist subject, like fashion, or gardening, which will appeal to a minority of the audience, and which can often be relegated to some cutesy ‘And-Finally’ slot. Now, of course, this is a caricature, too, and things are better than they once were—but even today, science stories are still run in a most uncritical fashion, as if the news editor in charge has had no means of weighing the validity of a story except in terms of sensationalism. Witness the treatment of the recent story about the efficacy of antidepressants, which created a great deal of scaremongering heat and not much critical light. One can say much the same about the treatment of much research, especially biomedical, in which correlations are made without much attention to causation; or stories in which there is a broad consensus, but news editors insist that the occasional gadfly is given undue prominence to satisfy journalistic concepts of balanced reporting; or any story which depends for its importance on the proper scientific appreciation of concepts such a probability and risk.

A good, recent example of this is reporting on a ‘cluster’ of young suicides in a small corner of South Wales. Journalists have hyped this, looking for some common cause (social networking sites, for example), when the suicide rate in this part of the world is, in fact, no greater now than it usually is. The fact that one of the suicides was a pretty girl turned it into a ‘story’ (I thank Clare Thomas of Nature Medicine for passing this link on to me).

One could go on. And on. And on.

The message is that scientists intent on being journalists should realize that their lofty aim of spreading scientific literacy more widely will be stymied unless they set their goals higher than just writing about it in blogs or in the mainstream media. They must become news editors, too, so that, in good marxian fashion, scientists can take over the means of production.

Only then will the message get across, and dear old calcium can be released from its intracellular stores.