Reporting the Truth on Lie Detectors

***UPDATE 11th March*** Professor Francisco Lacerda will be meeting with MP’s in the House of Commons today to discuss how the libel laws are damaging science abroad as well as in the UK. http://www.su.se/english/about/news-and-events/scientists-threatened-with-legal-action-1.1149
2 http://blogs.su.se/frasse/
3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/12/voice-analysis-system-vra

Last updated: March 11 2010

Simon Singh Appeal Hearing

One of the most significant trials for free speech and science this year appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Tuesday 23rd February.

Science writer Simon Singh’s libel case v the British Chiropractic Association¹ was heard at the Court of Appeal by three of the most senior judges in England and Wales - Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley - on 23 Tuesday Februaryat 10.30 am. Their judgment is expected to make an important contribution to libel law due to the seniority of the panel.

The Court of Appeal judges will decide the meaning of Singh’s article then rule whether it is fact or comment. This follows a ruling in October 2009, which gave leave to appeal Mr Justice Eady’s judgement in May 2009 that the writing was factual. The hearing is a rare opportunity to clarify the right to ‘fair comment’, one of the few defences available in a libel action.²

Simon Singh said after the appeal said: “First of all, thanks to everyone who came to the Court of Appeal today, and everyone who has been so supportive over the last two years. Without your goodwill, I probably would have caved in a long time ago.

I am delighted the Court of Appeal has decided to reconsider the meaning of my article about chiropractic, and I am particularly glad that three such eminent judges will make the ruling. They grilled both sides on all aspects of the appeal. However I should stress that whatever the outcome there is still a long way to go in this libel case. It has been almost two years since t he article was published, and yet we are still at a preliminary stage of identifying the meaning of my article. It could easily take another two years before the case is resolved.

More important than my particular case is the case for libel reform and I know that you share my concern on this matter. My greatest desire is that journalists in future should not have to endure such an arduous and expensive libel process, which has already affected the careers of health journalists such as Ben Goldacre, and which is currently bearing down on the eminent cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst. If Peter loses his case then he will be bankrupted. Please continue to spread the word about libel reform”

Robert Dougans, Bryan Cave LLP, Simon’s solicitor said: “It was encouraging to see three such senior judges taking such an interest in the appeal, and the BCA’s counsel was given a thorough grilling by the court.

What was significant was that the Lord Chief Justice said he was surprised that the BCA had not taken the opportunity offered them back in 2008 to publish their side of the story in the Guardian, rather than insisting Simon apologise and beginning proceedings. He also said it was a waste of both parties’ time and effort. I hope that this is borne in mind by MPs when they grapple with the need for libel reform.”

You can see photos of supporters at the court here

You can read an opinion piece in The Times by Professor Raymond Tallis here and by Simon Singh in The Telegraph here

Notes:

Simon Singh was sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) because of an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008 on the lack of evidence for the claims some chiropractors make on treating certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma with chiropractic. The BCA did not take up the offered right to reply but sued Singh personally. More background to the case here: http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/340 His case, and a number of other high profile cases of medics and scientists being sued for libel for criticising medical claims including Dr Ben Goldacre and Dr Peter Wilmshurst, prompted the launch of the Keep Libel Laws out of Science campaign in June 2009. In December 2009 the Keep Libel Laws out of Science campaign joined up with Index on Censorship, the free speech charity, and English PEN, the writers’ organisation, to form the Libel Reform Coalition. Together they launched the petition for reform of the libel laws to include a public interest defence for writers writing on important subjects which now has over 30,000 signatures at http://www.libelreform.org

Defences available in a libel action are:

Fair Comment - this defence requires that the defendant shows their writing was comment and not fact and is on a matter of public interest.

Justification - you can defend a libel claim by showing that your writing is factually true. The words are assumed to be false and the burden of proof is on the defendant to show that they are true.

Privilege - there are some circumstances where people are absolutely protected from libel action e.g. MPs speaking in Parliament and some occasions where writing qualifies for privilege because of the duty of the person making the statement e.g. in employment references or when reporting a crime.

For more information on libel law please contact Síle Lane on 020 7478 4380 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

    Last updated: February 24 2010

Interesting Articles

Shoot down science at your own risk, Alan Dangour - January 2010

Dr Alan Dangour, who recently spoke on his experiences “Standing up for Science” for Sense About Science, writes in Eureka about the backlash against his research looking at the benefits of organic produce. In the article he states the importance of defending scientific evidence and standing up for science. Read article here.

See a video about VoYS and how it got started, 2008

Tracey Brown got named by SEED magazine as one of their Revolutionary Minds and was interviewed explaining how VoYS got started and the work they do. Click here to see the video.

    Last updated: January 08 2010

Celebrities and Science 2009

People in the public eye are often drawn to promoting theories, therapies and campaigns that make no scientific sense. Sense About Science keeps a case file of examples of celebrity statements sent in by scientists and members of the public. Every year we review celebrities’ dodgy science claims - from special diets and ‘miracle’ cures to chemicals, vaccines and evolution - and ask scientists what they should have said instead.

What’s new in the review of 2009?

We were disappointed to note that, for the first time, sporting names are prominent in the review, particularly for endorsing unproven therapies. Over 2010, we will be taking the ‘check your facts’ message into the sporting world, in an effort to turn this around so that UK athletes will lead on scientific sense in the 2012 Olympics.

Overall, the main message from scientists to celebrities this year is nutrition is neither the cure nor cause of everything. We have seen a flurry of comments about diet and nutrition, such as Roger Moore’s claim that foie gras is causing Alzheimer’s disease and Heather Mills’ claim that meat gives you “the illness you die of”.

In the 2008 Celebrities and Science review, we were tentatively optimistic that celebrities had dropped their enthusiasm for ‘chemical free’ products and lifestyles. Sadly, like shoulder pads and mini-skirts, ‘chemical free’ claims never really go away and in 2009 we have seen renewed calls to avoid deodorants and the pill because they ‘contain chemicals’. Once again this year, scientists are stressing that nothing is chemical free and the effect of specific chemicals depends on the dose.

“By correcting these mistakes, the scientists are not just helping celebrities but also giving the public the means to explain why these claims are wrong. In 2010 we invite more celebrities to get in touch to check their facts before broadcasting them. We have over 4000 scientists willing to help and we do it for free.” Ellen Raphael, director UK, Sense About Science

Media coverage

The Sun Celebs talk a load of non-science

Closeronline Celebrity health myths!

New Scientist Politicians and celebrities shamed for science gaffes

The Daily Mail Don’t be taken in by the celebrity quacks, says charity

The Telegraph Beware the celebrity quacks: Megan Fox says vinegar will keep you slim

The Times Celebrities named and shamed for crazy comments in the name of science

and From Heather Mills to Roger Moore: Celebrities’ cod science debunked

The Family GP I’m a celebrity - what do I know?

    Last updated: January 07 2010

100 reasons why global warming is natural, The Daily Express, 15th December 2009

The Daily Express published a front page article ¹ with an accompanying report by the European Foundation detailing the “100 reasons why global warming is natural”. The article quotes Jim McConalogue from the Foundation who suggests the list “demonstrates how tenuous, improper and indeed false the scientific and political claims are for man-made global warming [...] when in fact there is little evidence to support any of these claims”. The article states that the list includes the controversial claim that there is “no scientific proof that rising levels of greenhouse gases are caused by human activity.”
Here, Professor Paul Hardaker, Royal Metereological Society , responds to some of the points from the list and questions the helpfulness of running such a story on the front page of the Daily Express.

“We know that our climate is warming, we can measure that. A number of centres around the world, using different data and analysis methods, have shown this. Since the 1820s we have known that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases warm our atmosphere. We also know that carbon dioxide levels have risen as a direct consequence of our burning of fossil fuels. Undoubtedly there is natural variation in our climate. We can see that from one year to the next and on very long geological timescales, but the warming trend that we have observed over the last 150 years is far more rapid than anything we have seen before and not explainable by natural variation alone. It is only when we include the much larger effect of our greenhouse gas emissions that we can explain what we observe.

That is not to say we know everything there is to know about our changing climate. There is uncertainty in how temperature will respond to emissions, but only about the amount of warming, not whether it will warm or not. We do not yet completely understand how regional rainfall patterns will change in a number of places across the globe, but we know that this will change, and that in itself will bring difficulties to a large number of the global population. We are unsure of the precise rate at which sea level will rise, but we know that it will continue to rise and that this process will only be reversible on very long timescales.

Good science and good scientists welcome challenge, debate and discussion; that’s how we develop a richer level of understanding and it’s a practice that is commonplace within science, but the front page of The Express provided little that could have helped people understand these important and complex issues.”

¹ 100 reasons why global warming is natural, The Daily Express

    Last updated: December 19 2009

Systematic Reviews

‘The review was biased’. ‘They left out relevant studies’. ‘The scope of the review was limited’.

These are all criticisms that have been levelled at systematic reviews on contentious subjects like organic food, homeopathy and vitamin supplements, often followed by a call that the review must therefore be ignored. But these accusations fail to grasp how systematic reviews are conducted, not recognising that for a review to be useful it must set a standard for the studies it includes and focus on a well-defined, question.

So what makes a good systematic review? Why are certain studies excluded? If they don’t contain new research why are they more authoritative than other studies? This two page briefing responds to these questions and explains:
why systematic reviews matter

why choosing studies for inclusion in a systematic review is not a personal or political decision but based on scientific reasoning

the role they play evaluating all the evidence for a particular question and guiding research and policy decisions.

what questions should be asked when looking at media stories about systematic reviews

Comments:

Sir Iain Chalmers, James Lind Initiative: “If scientists embarking on new research do not routinely use scientifically defensible methods for finding out what is known already, research resources are wasted. In addition, in an applied field of research like health care, the result of not beginning and ending reports of research with systematic reviews of other relevant evidence is that patients suffer and sometimes die unnecessarily.”

Dr Richard Horton, Editor, The Lancet: “Placing the results of any scientific study into context is essential to prevent the misunderstanding of new research. Sadly, too often researchers, funders, and journal editors fail to interpret new work in the light of the totality of available evidence. The consequence may well be harm to patients. Without an attempt to integrate the results of new research into existing knowledge, science has no meaning - and can sometimes be dangerous.”

Dr Evan Harris MP: “Politicians need to be able to make decisions based on the best available evidence. Wherever possible, evidence-based policy needs to use systematic reviews because they are the “gold standard” in that they evaluate the totality of evidence for any question and sift the good quality evidence from the bad and the frankly ugly which are thrown at policy-makers by vested interest groups.”

Dr Alan Dangour, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: “Systematic Reviews are an enormously powerful tool available to scientists to assess the quality, and synthesise the totality, of the available evidence on a specific question in an unbiased way. An understanding of the methods involved in systematic reviews is vital to help appreciate the significance of their conclusions.”

    Last updated: November 23 2009

Comment on the sacking of Professor David Nutt

The sacking of Professor David Nutt from the Advisory Council for Misuse of Drugs will hit the Government’s access to independent advice very hard. It will discourage scientists, many of whom are already expressing cynicism about the use of evidence in policy, and silence exactly the kind of critical scrutiny that good policy depends upon¹. The Phillips Report into the BSE crisis made the fundamental point that much of the scientific advice to government at that time was characterised by acquiescence and an unwillingness to stand up to political pressure. We risk heading straight back to that situation.

Tracey Brown
Managing Director
Sense About Science

Notes:
¹ Tracey Brown, Oral Evidence, House of Commons Innovation, Universities and Skills Committee, Eighth Report of Session 2008-09.

    Last updated: October 30 2009

Voice of Young Science

The VoYS programme helps research scientists in the early stages of their career to get actively involved in public debates about science.

As a table:

ONE TWO THREE

A B C

In divs:

TEXT A

TEXT B

TEXT C

    Last updated: January 08 2010

Presentation

voys slides

    Last updated: February 08 2010

Complaint about Simon Singh and the Keep Libel Laws out of Science campaign

October 2009 The Charity Commission has dismissed a complaint about Sense About Science’s involvement in the Keep Libel Laws out of Science campaign.

Read original letter from the Charity Commission

Read Sense About Science response to complaint

Read the Charity Commission response

    Last updated: October 07 2009

Sir John Maddox 1925 - 2009

From our Chairman:

You will all have read the many tributes that were paid to John Maddox, who died last month. Few scientists can have received more glowing obituaries. At Sense About Science we felt privileged to have had him as one of our founding trustees, who added distinction and direction to our activities from the start, when we most needed it. He was deeply committed to our aims, a regular presence at board meetings and generous with his time for advice and comment. In her early days as Director, Tracey Brown learned much from John about being tough and focused. Whenever she ventured that we couldn’t do a thing, he always asked “why not?” We will miss him very much.

Dick Taverne

    Last updated: May 15 2009

Thank you for your support

Your name will be added to the list, but this may take a little time.

Click here to read the statement and here to see who else has signed it.

Main Page

    Last updated: July 16 2009

Sign up to help Keep the Libel Laws out of Science

***UPDATE 10 December 2009***The Campaign is gaining momentum and we have now joined with EnglishPEN and Index on Censorship in the Coalition for Libel Reform. Add your voice and sign the petition to urge politicians to support a bill for major reform of the libel laws now, at www.libelreform.org.

    Last updated: December 10 2009

OFT LAUNCHES FAKE WEBSITES TO WARN OF BOGUS WEIGHT LOSS AND ‘MIRACLE’ HEALTH CURE’

As part of its Scams Awareness Month, the OFT has launched two spoof websites to warn consumers of the dangers of ‘miracle’ health and weight loss scams that cost UK consumers an estimated £20m every year.

Employing similar techniques to those used by scammers, the OFT will be drawing consumers to the spoof - but initially convincing - miracle cure sites and then revealing that they are the victims of a potential scam. Internet banner advertising, sponsored links on search engine sites, and keyword techniques that push the sites higher up in online searches, will be used to drive consumers looking for health or slimming treatments to the fake websites.
The websites can be found at: www.consumerdirect.gov.uk/fatfoe and www.consumerdirect.gov.uk/glucobate

The first website, for ‘Fatfoe’ pads, claims that the product ‘sucks out excess fat and cellulite while you sleep’ so that you can enjoy your favorite foods and still lose up to twenty pounds of weight a week. The second website, for ‘Glucobate’, claims that the product is ‘the all-natural diabetes breakthrough’ that diabetics have been waiting for with ‘the healing aromatics of muskmelon’. But consumers who try to order from the websites are redirected to a page explaining that the products are fake, posted by the OFT to warn about the dangers of such scams.
The initiative is being supported by Sense About Science, an independent charitable trust which responds to misrepresentation about science, and leading diabetes charity Diabetes UK.

Every year an estimated 200,000 UK consumers waste money on ‘miracle’ cures for everything including baldness, obesity, impotence and old age. The OFT has previously taken action to stop a variety of misleading claims, ranging from a suction pad worn on the foot which claimed to suck out excess fat though a ‘trap door’ in the skin, a ‘negative calorie’ chocolate of which it was claimed ‘the more you eat the more you lose’, and a strip placed on the tongue that claimed to be ‘five times more powerful than any other impotency pill, spray or cure’.

The OFT advises consumers to be wary of miracle health products that:

claim to be a medical ‘breakthrough’ - often scammers falsely say the product has been successfully tested and fabricate scientific ‘experts’ and institutions,

use questionable ‘success stories’ - scammers often use fake customer testimonials

offer a ‘no risk’ money back guarantee to try and convince you the claims are genuine - scammers will just take your money.

Mike Haley, OFT Director of Consumer Protection, said:
“Miracle health scams target vulnerable people who are desperate to lose weight or find a cure. The products are often worthless and can even be dangerous with untested and potentially harmful ingredients. Always seek professional advice from your doctor or pharmacist before you part with your money.”

Diabetes UK Care Advisor Zoe Harrison said:
“Companies offering fake supplements often play on the most vulnerable members of society and in the vast majority of cases there is no evidence to suggest the ‘medication’ is safe for people with diabetes to take, let alone help them manage their condition.”

Alice Tuff, Development Officer at Sense About Science said:
“The internet is cluttered with adverts and chat-room conversations testifying to ‘incredible’ benefits from untested, sometimes bogus, cures and treatments. The emotional and financial costs of these for the people who get drawn in can be huge and it is vital that we keep promoting public vigilance in tackling this serious problem.”

NOTES

OFT research shows that 78 per cent of victims of miracle health scams are women and 70 per cent are aged between 35 and 64. However, only one per cent of respondents ever report this type of scam to the authorities.
The OFT has takhttp://www.oft.gov.uk/news/press/2007/89-08)en action to stop a range of misleading slimming and health claims - see press releases (http://www.oft.gov.uk/news/press/2007/169-07), (http://www.oft.gov.uk/news/press/2007/89-07), (http://www.oft.gov.uk/news/press/2007/82-07), (http://www.oft.gov.uk/news/press/2007/4-07). (http://www.oft.gov.uk/news/press/2007/101-06)
The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (‘CPRs’ ) contain a general prohibition against unfair commercial practices and, in particular prohibitions against misleading actions, misleading omissions and aggressive commercial practices. False claims that a product is able to cure illnesses, dysfunction or malformations are also banned. The Regulations are enforceable through the civil and criminal courts.

Scams Awareness Month is part of an annual international initiative organised by the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network. The OFT has enlisted the support of Local Authority Trading Standards Services, Consumer Direct, and other consumer and industry bodies.

Sense About Science is an independent charitable trust that responds to the misrepresentation of science and scientific evidence on issues that matter to society. It also works with scientists and civic groups to promote evidence and scientific reasoning in public discussion. For more details visit their website http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk
The concept of Fatfoe and Glucobate have been adapted from a similar campaign by the US Federal Trade Commission and the Competition Bureau of Canada to warn about diet and health scams.

Coverage so far includes:

The Daily Telegraph online “OFT: Chocolate does not help you lose weight”

The Daily Mail online “Too good to be true: Warning over weight-loss chocolate and other ‘miracle’ cures”

The Daily Mirror online “At last, a miracle diet website from people we trust. Plus a great diabetes one.”

UK Medix Health news “OFT Launches Its Own Weight Loss Scams”

Web User.uk “OFT launches fake health websites”

24dash.com “OFT launches fake websites to warn of bogus health cures”

    Last updated: March 11 2009

presentation

TB MHRA presentation
TB MHRA presentation

    Last updated: September 10 2009

Standing up for Science 2 - the nuts and bolts

Standing up for Science 2-the nuts and bolts is a guide for early career scientists, engineers. medics and others who want to promote good science and fight misinformation. It contains examples of different ways how to stand up for science in public - from hunting down the evidence behind product claims to correcting misinformation in all kinds of media - along with practical tips on how to do it.

The guide has been developed by a team of early career scientists who, after attending VoYS workshops and working on There Goes the Science Bit…, The Detox Dossier and other myth busting activities, wanted to share their experiences and advice.

The VoYS network want to inspire others to join them and get involved, but they also want to send the message that it doesn’t always have to be about big actions and no matter who you are, what your background is or how much experience you have, there are plenty of things that can be done that have an effect on public debates about science.

Standing up for Science 2 is available to download here. Hard copies can be requested via .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

With thanks to all thank all the contributors and the following VoYS members: Harriet Ball, Rosemary Coates, Anne Corbett, Maria Cruz, Frances Downey, Elizabeth Gaskell , Johnny Kelsey, Jennifer Lardge, Ian Mabbett, Suzanne MacKenzie, Nicola Powles-Glover, Fiona Randell, Andrew Russell, Simon Shears, Tom Sheldon, Juliet Stevens, Frank Swain, Richard Van Noorden, Debbie Wake, Thomas Wells, Sarah Whitehead and Robin Wilkinson.

The Launch

The background

Since 2004, VoYS Standing up for Science media workshops have been responding to early career researchers’ concerns and fears about the media head on. These range from queries as to why not all science journalists have science backgrounds, to accusations of misrepresentation of science by the media.

Many of our participants wanted to go on and spread the word about getting involved in public debates about science to their friends and colleagues. In response to this Sense About Science created the VoYS network, which operates to support early career researchers wanting to make their voices’ heard in public debates about science. The VoYS network have their own forum and have produced the following publications:

Standing up for Science, a guide to the media which provides insight into how the media reports science and gives practical tips on what to do if a journalist calls.

There Goes Science Bit…, a hunt for the evidence behind pseudoscientific product claims

The Detox Dossier, a hunt for the evidence behind detox claims made for products and diets, and their campaign to alert the public.

If you are interested in joining the VoYS network please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following organizations for help with its production and dissemination:

    Last updated: February 04 2009

The Detox Dossier

‘Detox’ has no meaning outside of the clinical treatment for drug addiction or poisoning. Today young scientists and engineers are publishing a dossier on their hunt for the evidence behind detox claims made for products and diets, and beginning a campaign to alert the public. They found:

No two companies seem to use the same definition of ‘detox’.

Little, and in most cases no, evidence was offered to back up the detox claims.

In the majority of cases, producers and retailers contacted by the young scientists were forced to admit that they are renaming mundane things, like cleaning or brushing, as ‘detox’.

They range in price from £1-2 for a detox drink to £36.95 for detox bath accessories.

The dossier shows that, while companies and individuals now use the claim ‘detox’ to promote everything from foot patches to hair straighteners, they are unable to provide reliable evidence or consistent explanations of what the ‘detox’ process is supposed to be.

The investigation has been conducted by the Voice of Young Science (VoYS) network of over 300 early career researchers. It follows the publication of “There Goes The Science Bit…” with the charity Sense About Science a year ago, when a group of young scientists exposed dodgy science claims by making phone calls to product manufacturers. After widespread publicity for the publication, they received many subsequent examples, where the word ‘detox’ came up repeatedly, and offers of help. This led to a rapidly growing network of evidence hunters and this new investigation.

Today, as the dossier is published, many of the scientists involved - including physiologists, biochemists, doctors and pharmacists - will be launching their own ‘detox’ leaflet, Debunking Detox, to the public outside high street retailers in central London. The leaflet promotes the liver and kidneys as a fantastic ‘detox’ system and explains why there is no need to spend money on expensive products and treatments.

Sense About Science is a small charity promoting evidence and good science for the public. We depend on donations, large and small, from people who support our work. You can donate, or find out more at www.senseaboutscience.org/donate

    Last updated: January 05 2009

Celebrities and Science Review 2008

It’s that time of the year when Sense About Science asks scientists to review what celebrities have said about science and medicine, from detox and special diets to chemicals, MMR and radiation.

Scientists have responded to celebrities including: Kelly Osbourne on avoiding cancer risks, Tom Cruise on psychiatry, Demi Moore’s promotion of detoxing with leeches, Ivanka Trump and ‘spit’ parties, Amanda Peet defending MMR, Mariah Carey’s use of Einstein’s equation, Jenny McCarthy misunderstanding MMR, Nigella Lawson on special diets, Delia Smith on sugar addiction, Carole Caplin on food supplements and more! Scientists also couldn’t resist a response to US presidential candidates on the subjects of the MMR vaccine and fruit fly research.

While UK celebs have improved and are taking more care when discussing science and medicine, their international counterparts haven’t done so well. Sense About Science’s files are still too full of examples of pseudo-scientific claims.

We’ve also discovered this year that the subjects have changed: the most common misconception of the last couple of years was how products or food can be ‘chemical free’, something which doesn’t appear this year. References to the effectiveness of detox have however remained steady. New topics appear too, including genetic testing, psychiatry, maths and international celebrities have resurrected inaccurate claims about the MMR vaccine. There have been big improvements amongst the UK celebs in medicine and health and nutrition and food production.

“We don’t expect people to know everything about science; the problem comes when they don’t consider checking it or asking a few questions before they speak out. With the internet, and 24-hour news media, celebrities’ misleading claims travel widely. They add disproportionately to the stock of misinformation that we all then have to wade through to make sense of a subject. A little checking goes a long way.” Ellen Raphael, director UK, Sense About Science

See below for some of the media coverage

The Times Don’t take health tips from celebs if you know what’s good for you

The Independent Scientific illiteracy all the rage among the glitterati

NME Mariah Carey told off by Scientists for E=MC^2 claims

The Financial Times Atlantic Divide Opens on Celebrity Science

The Guardian Mariah Carey Officially Rubbish at Maths

bbc.co.uk Stars ‘Misleading’ About Science

Channel 4 News Warning Over Celebs’ Health Advice

The Telegraph Celebrities Attacked by Science Charity for ‘Offering Bad Science Tips’

Sense About Science depends on donations, large and small, from people who support our work. You can donate, or find out more at www.senseaboutscience.org/donate

    Last updated: January 20 2009

News archive

February 2009

24February 2009

Tackling miracle-cure web scams Sense About Science welcomes the OFT’s new website initiative on miracle cures. Read more

20 February 2009

Manchester VoYS Standing up for Science Media workshop Our next workshop is being held in Manchester on Friday 27th March. Application by CV and covering letter by Friday 13th March. Read more

9 February 2009

Making Sense of GM Sense About Science has published a public quide on what is the genetic modification of plants and why are scientists doing it? Read more

5 February 2009

Standing up for Science 2 - the nuts and bolts VoYS have launched their latest publication to help other early career scientists, engineers, medics and others who want to promote good science and fight misinformation. Read more

2 February 2009

Publish or be damned: peer review, the public and you What does peer review do for science? Is maverick science rejected? Does peer review matter to the public?
Workshop for early career researchers, AAAS Annual Meeting, Chicago, Sunday 15th February.
Read more

January 2009

16 January 2009

Nuclear Fusion Click the Nuclear Information Library for an updated statement on the search for new energy sources Read more

5 January 2009

Detox Dossier ‘Detox’ has no meaning outside of the clinical treatment for drug addiction or poisoning. Today young scientists and engineers are publishing a dossier on their hunt for the evidence behind detox claims made for products and diets, and beginning a campaign to alert the public. Read more

December 2008

27 December 2008

Science & Celebrities 2008 People in the public eye are often drawn to promoting theories, therapies and campaigns that make no scientific sense. Two years on we review progress: are celebrities checking their science ‘facts’? Read more

24 December 2008

‘Research, publishing it, reviewing it and talking publicly about it’ Workshop 2009 We are continuing to pilot our new workshops on Research, publishing it, reviewing it and talking publicly about it for early career scientists and engineers. The next one is on Friday 23 January, 2009(Find out more). Application is with CV and covering letter by Thursday 15 January. To find out more information or apply please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Read more

17 December 2008

MRI and EU regulations Read an update on MRI and EU regulations. Read more

11 December 2008

Christmas Reading Room 2008 is now open! Sense About Science’s famous Christmas Reading room is now open! We’ve collected reading recommendations from some of Sense About Science’s Trustees, Advisory Council, Staff and friends and if you buy your Christmas gifts from Amazon using the Sense About Science link, part of the proceeds go to Sense About Science. Read more

November 2008

18 November 2008

Job Opportunity: Public Liaison We have a vacancy for the role of Public Liaison. Application deadline is the 24th November. Read more

10 November 2008

I’ve got nothing to lose by trying it - A guide to weighing up claims about cures and treatments Published today, it explains how to tell the beneficial from the bogus in the face of the miracle cure stories, new wonder-drugs and breakthrough therapies that are increasingly promoted. Read more

October 2008

25 October 2008

Evidence-Based Medicine Matters “Only since the advent of scientific medicine has life expectancy leapt forward…” Read comments from over a hundred different people on why evidence-based medicine matters to them. To mark forty years since the Medicines Act (1968) doctors, scientists, nurses, patients, professional societies, journal editors, patient groups and other members of the public are providing compelling stories about why evidence-based medicine mattered then and matters now. Read more

10 October 2008

The Peer Review Education Resource for Key Stage 4 teachers is now live! Sense About Science has launched an online education resource that provides insights into what scientific knowledge is, how it is acquired and the questions to ask of scientific information in the public domain. Read more

6 October 2008

Making Sense of Radiation - A guide to radiation and its health effects Scientists, engineers and medical professionals have come together to counter public misinformation about radiation and health effects. They say that the public discussion is confusing, with people left struggling to weigh up which claims to take seriously. Many people have become anxious about exposure to non-ionising forms of radiation, from mobiles, Wi-Fi and masts. The scientists also fear that people are now being encouraged to spend their money on all manner of unnecessary products that claim to protect from EMFs. Read more

3 October 2008

Job Opportunity: Communications Officer - full time We have a vacancy for a Communications Officer. Application deadline is 17th October. Read more

September 2008

2 September 2008

Should pregnant women avoid perfumes? Professor Richard Sharpe puts the record straight on recent media reports of his research. Read more

August 2008

July 2008

11 July 2008

Are mercury fillings dangerous? The Daily Mail published a story titled ” ‘Hidden danger’ of mercury leaking from dental fillings”. Professor Aubrey Sheiham, Professor of Dental Public Health from the Department of Epidemiology at UCL, replies. Read more

2 July 2008

Comment on new Consumer Protection Regulations Frank Swain and Leonor Sierra argue that the new Consumer Protection Regulations could devalue the true meaning of ‘scientifically-proven’ Read more

June 2008

10 June 2008

Chlorinated water and birth defects Recent articles in the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail claimed that new research suggested “drinking tap water while pregnant may double the risk of serious heart or brain defects in the unborn child”. Read more

May 2008

29 May 2008

MRI and Safety Radiologists respond to misleading comments about the effects of MRI scanner. Read more

April 2008

28 April 2008

Does mother’s diet affect a baby’s sex? A recent study suggested that a mother’s energy intake around conception can exert an influence on the sex of the baby. How such an effect is exerted is unknown, but the chances are that diet influences which sperm fertilises the egg rather than affecting survival/implantation of the fertilised egg. Read more

3 April 2008

Brain Gym Sense About Science has been receiving calls from parents and teachers who are concerned about the use of ‘Brain Gym’ - a programme of teacher-led physical exercises claimed to improve cognitive abilities - in primary schools. Read more

March 2008

11 March 2008

Making Sense of Testing Health tests can do more harm than good for the ‘worried-well’... Read more

10 March 2008

Lecture 2008 “What is Science and Why Should We Care?”, by Professor Alan Sokal, was held on Wednesday 28th Feb at University College London. Read more

February 2008

27 February 2008

Alan Sokal Podcast In a podcast released today, Alok Jha interviews Alan Sokal. You can tune in via the Guardian website. Read more

25 February 2008

Manchester Standing up for Science Media Workshop Friday 18th April We are holding our next VoYS Standing up for Science Workshop on Friday 18th April at Manchester University. Applicants need to apply with a covering letter and CV and the deadline for applications is Friday 28th March. Please click here for more details Read more

21 February 2008

Alice discovers her inner elf Thanks to your donations, Alice was able to discover her inner elf, as she was coerced into dressing up as one of Santa’s little helpers for our end-of-year funding drive. Alice entertained small children and amused tourists as she posed for pictures in Piccadilly Circus… Read more

January 2008

3 January 2008

Celebrities and Science 2007 People in the public eye are often drawn to promoting theories, therapies and campaigns that make no scientific sense. One year on we review progress: are celebrities checking their science ‘facts’? Read more

2007

Under Construction

    Last updated: July 13 2009

Standing up for Science workshop for physical sciences and engineering

October 2007

Organised by Sense About Science, in association with Elsevier, the Society for General Microbiology, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Research Councils UK.

This event is open to early career researchers working in the physical sciences and engineering (post-doctoral fellows or equivalent in first job, and post-graduate students) and will be held on Friday 19th October 2007 in central London.
Are you passionate about your research? Do you think it is important for the good science and evidence to be communicated to a wider audience? What can you do about misconceptions and misinformation about science?

Sessions:

Science in the media: What happens when research announcements go wrong; statistics are manipulated; risk factors are distorted; or the discussions become polarised?

Speakers: Dr Mark Miodownik, Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at King’s College London, Dr Steve Keevil, Consultant Physicist in MRI, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Dr Sarah Bridle, Lecturer and Royal Society Research Fellow in the Cosmology subgroup of the Astrophysics Group at University College London
What journalists are looking for: How do journalists approach stories? Balance the need for news and entertainment with reporting science? And deal with accusations of polarising debates and misrepresenting the facts?

Speakers include Alok Jha (The Guardian), Anjana Ahuja (The Times) and Tom Fielden (BBC Radio 4), plus others to be confirmed!
Standing up for science; the nuts and bolts: What is there for early career researchers to play for?

Not yet the leaders in the field, what can you do to encourage good science and evidence in the public domain? This session offers practical guidance for early career researchers to get their voices heard in debates about science; how to respond to bad science when you see it; and top tips for if you come face-to-face with a journalist!

Speakers: Ellen Raphael, Sense About Science, Alice Tuff, VoYS co-ordinator, Sense About Science, Tom Sheldon, VoYS network member, Nancy Mendoza, Science Media Centre

These workshops are very popular and there are only 35 places available. Please apply with a CV and covering letter explaining your reason for applying to Alice Tuff: email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or by post to Sense About Science, 25 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D7EG.

The closing date for applications is Friday 5th October 2007

Comments about previous workshops:
“An excellent workshop that has made a big difference to the way I view science in the media”
“This workshop is needed by all science researchers in order to develop an informed attitude towards the media rather than the pessimistic attitude many scientists adopt”
“Brilliant day. Good for young scientists to meet each other and communicate together”

    Last updated: October 01 2007

Threat to good science in policy making

The Government has proposed plans to dissolve the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee next week - the final week of this parliamentary session. This would see the end of the Committee’s crucial role in scrutinising the Government’s use of science in policy making across all departments.

The proposal follows the move of the Office of Science and Innovation to the newly formed Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and the creation of a replacement select committee focusing on the university agenda. This will not have the same cross-cutting role nor concern with the role and calibre of science in policymaking. The Science and Technology committee’s recent work has excelled in dealing with cross-cutting science issues from EU plans to restrict the use of MRI scanning in hospitals to nanotechnology. A possible Science and Technology sub-committee would not be able to deliver this level of scrutiny.

Since Sense About Science publicised this proposal last week, many scientists and institutions have written in protest to the Government (for example see links below). We hope that the Government will listen to these protests and recognise that increased parliamentary scrutiny of science in policy making has been a progressive, if sometimes uncomfortable, development. Without it, calls for transparency and accountability in science and policy making can have little meaning. It will also become increasingly difficult for the scientific community to provide input into the scrutiny of policy. If this happens, Sense About Science is interested in how that might be redressed. We are following developments closely and will endeavour to post more news as it becomes available.
In the meantime, please contact Eric de Silva at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) .

Letter to The Guardian, July 20th

Editorial and article in Nature, July 19th (subscription necessary to gain access)

Letter to The Times, July 13th

UPDATE

As of the end of this parliamentary session the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee has been dissolved and a new Innovation, Universities and Skills (IUS) Committee created. The IUS Committee will decide at the start of the new parliamentary session in November whether or not to form a Science and Technology Subcommittee to deal with science policy issues.

    Last updated: July 30 2007

Sodium benzoate

In 2006 the Food Standards Agency (FSA) published the results of a survey measuring the levels of benzene in 150 soft drinks on sale in the UK. This was in response to allegedly dangerous levels of carcinogenic benzene in soft drinks as a result of sodium benzoate interacting with ascorbic acid (vitamin C). In more than two thirds of the samples tested the levels of benzene were undetectable, while 38 samples had levels between 1 and 10 ppb (parts per billion). The guideline level set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for water is 10 parts per billion (ppb). 1 ppb is 1 part per billion, i.e. 1/1,000,000,000, which is equivalent to 1 microgram per kilogram (1ug/kg).

In May 2007 The Independent ran a story that sodium benzoate, a common preservative in soft drinks, damages the mitochondria in cells. Sodium benzoate (E211) is used in carbonated drinks to prevent mould growth. The article was headlined “Caution: Some soft drinks may seriously harm your health”.

You can read The Independent article here

Here, Professor Sir Colin Berry, Emeritus Professor of Pathology responds:

Sodium benzoate is found naturally in cranberries, prunes, greengages, cinnamon, ripe cloves, and apples. Its concentration when used as a preservative is limited by the FDA in the U.S. to 0.1% by weight in drinks but it is interesting to note that organically-grown cranberries and prunes can contain levels exceeding this limit. The International Programme on Chemical Safety found no adverse effects in humans at doses of 647-825 mg/kg of body weight per day so the safety margin is vast.

Benzene is ubiquitous in the environment and is found in “mid-Pacific-ocean air” at around 10ppt, in “background air” at around 2-10 ppb (USA data) and in the interior of a car will reach around 10-20ppb. When you fill the car with petrol the air will contain around 0.1-1ppm. Around 500ug of benzene is produced from an “average” cigarette and smokers have benzene in their breath.

Here, Professor Andrew Cockburn, Toxicologist, responds:

The approved food additives ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and sodium benzoate can react to produce low levels of benzene when they are present in the same beverage. Exposure to low levels of benzene in industry over an extended period has been linked to the development of aplastic anaemia, which can lead to leukaemia.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has set the acceptable level of benzene in drinking water at 10 parts per billion (ppb). In early 2006, tests performed on beverages in the USA found levels 2-5 times above this, sparking international concern. In response to this FSANZ (Food Standards Australia New Zealand) conducted a survey on the status of Australian beverages and benzene levels.

Focusing on beverages that were more likely to contain benzene, such as soft drinks and fruit juice, FSANZ sampled 68 beverages sold in retail outlets from March to April 2006. Independent analysis showed that 56 percent of beverages contained trace levels of benzene, ranging from 1 to 40 ppb. Over 90 percent of the 68 beverages screened were below the WHO guideline of 10 ppb.

Typically you would have to drink 10 bottles in a day to exceed the WHO drinking water upper limit.

Benzene is also present in petrol vapours, car exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke; the main way the general population is exposed to it is through environmental exposure. The UK Food Standards Agency has stated that people would need to drink more than 20 litres of a drink containing benzene as an impurity to get the same level of exposure as from the environment.

    Last updated: July 03 2007

Wi-Fi networks

There have been a number of recent newspaper articles and a BBC Panorama documentary about the alleged harm of radiation from Wi-Fi, or wireless communication networks, on health. The Daily Telegraph reported in April the potential dangers to children from placing computers on their laps, while an article in The Independent in June described how a “naturopath” diagnosed her patient as suffering from “overexposure to Wi-Fi and mobile phone frequencies”. The recent Panorama investigation claimed that radiation from a Wi-Fi unit in a school was three times that of a mobile phone mast 100m away, and that precautions should be taken with children who maybe more sensitive to radiation from Wi-Fi units.

You can read The Independent article here, The Daily Telegraph article here and details about the BBC Panorama programme article here.

Professor David Coggon, Environmental Epidemiologist responds:

The radio waves used in Wi-Fi are similar to those produced by mobile phones, but have a slightly different frequency (analogous to the difference between medium and long wave radio transmissions). They also differ in their exact signal characteristics. The limited evidence that has been published to date indicates that levels of exposure from use of a laptop with Wi-Fi are generally much lower than those from using a mobile phone, and that those simply from being in an area where Wi-Fi is used are even lower. However, it would be helpful to have more research on this.

There has now been a lot of research on possible health risks from mobile phones, as well as from other sources of radio waves such as television transmitters. The balance of evidence does not point to adverse effects, either in the short or the longer term. This makes it less likely that Wi-Fi poses a health hazard.

Nobody can ever guarantee that anything in life is completely safe, and inevitably there are scientific uncertainties. For example, one could speculate that there might be a hazard peculiar to the exact frequency band or signal characteristics of Wi-Fi. However, from our current understanding of the biophysics of radio waves, this seems extremely unlikely.

On electrosmog, Professor Anthony Davies, Electronic Engineer, responds:

‘Smog’ is derived from ‘Smoky fog’ and refers to a kind of polluted fog which can be actually and provably harmful, and was a real and serious problem in cities such as London in the 1950s. Using the word ‘Smog’ in the context of electromagnetic radiation is a clear attempt to bias the listener by associating almost-certainly harmless radiation with recollections of the harm caused by polluted fog in the past. If Wi-Fi signals are to be called ‘electromagnetic smog’, then for consistency, the term ‘daylight smog’ should be used to describe ordinary sunlight.

more information describing Wi-Fi:

Description of wireless communication from the Health Protection Agency

Wi-fi? Why worry? article from Bill Thompson at the BBC

    Last updated: July 24 2007

May 2007 Speaker Biographies

Voice of Young Science Workshop - About the speakers
Friday 18th May, 2007

Session 1

Azra Ghani
Azra Ghani is a Reader in Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at the London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine. After a first degree in mathematics, an MSc in Operational Research and a Phd in epidemiology, she moved to Oxford to work on mathematical models for the BSE and vCJD epidemics. Subsequently she held Wellcome and Royal Society Fellowships first at Oxford and subsequently Imperial College before moving to her current position in 2005. Her research focuses on the analysis of infectious diseases including BSE/vCJD, SARS and currently Avian Influenza. Through this work she has had considerable experience in presenting results of her work to the UK and international media.

Steven Keevil
Stephen Keevil is a medical physicist with nearly 20 years experience in medical applications of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He is currently Consultant Physicist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals and Honorary Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. Among other professional activities, he is Chair of the Science, Engineering and Technology Committee of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (IPEM) and a member of the Institute’s Council. In 2003 he became involved in the MRI community’s campaign about the impact of the Physical Agents (EMF) Directive on MRI, and he has worked closely with Sense About Science on this issue.

Stephen Minger
Stephen Minger is the Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory and a Senior Lecturer at the Wolfson Centre for Age Related Diseases at King’s College London. In 2002, together with Dr Susan Pickering and Professor Peter Braude, Dr Minger was awarded one of the first two licenses granted by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for the derivation of human embryonic stem (ES) cells. His group subsequently generated the first human ES cell line in the UK and was one of the first groups to deposit this into the UK Stem Cell Bank. They have gone on to generate five new human ES cell lines, including one that encodes the most common genetic mutation resulting in Cystic Fibrosis and another one that contains the Huntington’s disease mutation.

Session 2

Anjana Ahuja
Anjana Ahuja is a feature writer and science columnist for The Times. She sits on advisory committees for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council. Anjana appears regularly on radio, and is often invited to chair debates related to the public understanding of science. She holds a PhD in space physics from Imperial College.

Rachael Buchanan
Rachael Buchanan is the Medical Producer for BBC News & is part of the team of health & science specialists. She works primarily with Medical Correspondent Fergus Walsh, making television news pieces about medical science & ethics for the BBC 1 Six & Ten O’Clock news bulletins. Rachael has worked as a television news journalist since 1997. Prior to her current position she was BBC News’ Senior Science Producer - covering the whole range of scientific issues - from climate change and foot & mouth disease to black holes and life on Mars.

Alok Jha
Alok Jha arrived at Imperial College in 1994 determined to become a particle physicist. A year of indescribably complex mathematics later, he shelved his plans to become the next Richard Feynman and began to concentrate instead on the music reviews for the college newspaper. Physics degree complete, he moved wholeheartedly into news reporting for Research Fortnight, a small science policy newsletter. In 2003 he joined The Guardian as a science correspondent, part of the launch team for Life, then the weekly science section. He now mainly writes news, features and comment on everything from botany to space physics for the daily science page in the new and improved Guardian, while contributing regularly to the other sections of the paper.

Fiona Macrae
Fiona MacRae is science reporter at the Daily Mail. She studied medical microbiology at Edinburgh University before training in journalism in Cardiff. After spending three & a half years covering general news at the News & Star in Carlisle, she moved to London, where she joined the Daily Mail. There, she continued to cover general news, while also gaining newsdesk experience. Since starting to cover science 18 months ago, she has led the Mail’s coverage of bird flu. She also regularly covers health, the environment, food technology & social sciences.

Session 3

Claire Bithell
Claire Bithell has a degree in Cell Biology and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Manchester. Her PhD focussed on using different types of microscopy to study the movements inside frog eggs. She won the Daily Telegraph’s young science writer award in 2003, and this convinced her to leave bench science and begin a career in science communication. After getting some work experience with Cancer Research UK, Manchester Museum and writing for academic magazines, Claire began work at the Science Media Centre in 2004 as Science Information Officer. She was promoted to Senior Press Officer in December 2005.

Frances Downey (chair)
Frances is volunteer coordinator of the VoYS network. She is currently doing a PhD at King’s College London developing a breast cancer diagnostic tool using Raman scattering. Previous to this she worked at Sense About Science as a Programme Researcher. This involved working on the Peer Review and Voice of Young Science projects. She also oversaw Sense About Science’s first publication developed specifically for early career scientists, Standing up for Science. She has a physics BSc from King’s College London and an EPSRC-funded MRes in imaging and X-Ray imaging.

Adrian Mulligan
Adrian Mulligan has a range of experience having worked in publishing for 10 years. During the last 6 years his position in research has given him a unique opportunity to study the scholarly community. He has conducted research into author motivations and behaviour, peer review and most recently completed a study examining the core trends in scholarly publishing. He has presented on these topics at various conferences including the 2006 STM conferences held in Budapest and Frankfurt. Adrian’s background is in archaeology with a B.A. degree and MSc from Leicester University, and he also has professional qualifications from the Market Research Society.

Ellen Raphael
Ellen Raphael is Programme Manager at Sense About Science. She studied sociology at the University of Kent and has a master’s degree in Social Research. She is responsible for the design and implementation of Sense About Science projects, working with scientists to produce materials for the public on contentious subjects including chemicals, weather and radiation. As a non-scientist she enjoys grilling scientists to separate facts from fiction and is constantly surprised by what she discovers.

    Last updated: June 26 2007

VoYS May 2007

Organised by Sense About Science, in association with the Biochemical Society, Elsevier, Institute of Biology, Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, the Medical Research Council, Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, the Society for Applied Microbiology and the Society for General Microbiology.

Voice of Young Science workshop (biological sciences and bioengineering)

18th May 2007

Sense About Science’s ninth VoYS media workshop was held at the Institute of Biology for early career researchers from biological sciences and bioengineering.

In the first session, Science in the Media, we heard from Professor Stephen Minger, Dr Azra Ghani, and Dr Steven Keevil (Find out more about the speakers…)

The panellists discussed their successes and the difficulties experienced when speaking to the media, from the lab coat stereotype to unfortunate quotes about Christopher Reed. There were many audience questions ranging from whether scientists enjoyed talking to the media, what level of personal responsibility scientists had to the public, the effects on their career from being in the media and how to deal with misrepresentation. The scientists concluded that despite the pitfalls that can be encountered, talking about science is worthwhile and scientists should get involved.

“This was a really good introduction and it was nice the panellists were positive about their experiences.”

“Insightful info about how scientists have dealt with the media - good that they talked about their mistakes as well as their successes.”

“Excellent session and speakers giving very frank and honest opinions about their media experiences”

Audience members on first session

Next came the journalists, Alok Jha, The Guardian, Rachael Buchanan, BBC News, Fiona MacRae, The Daily Mail and Anjana Ahuja, The Times. The session began with the delegates outlining how they felt the media could improve its reporting of science. The journalists defended their profession in a lively and vigorous debate, which gave a good insight into the world of science journalism. The audience asked how personally responsible journalists feel when reporting a story, particularly when it is controversial. This led to some very interesting comments and examples of how journalists try to be fair whilst taking the responsibility very seriously. The session helped the audience understand the difficulties of merging the world of scientists and the media.

“Very helpful to hear the journalists points of view to get a better understanding of their role and to see that they’re human too and have good motives for science reporting.”

“Good to understand what the media wants. At the end of the day the story has to be just that - a story and there has to be a public interest.”

“This was especially interesting as I had never met a science journalist before and it dispelled a lot of negative impressions.”

Audience members on second session

The final session saw the audience divided into three groups of ten for a more informal working session. Adrian Mulligan, Associate director of Academic Responsibilities at Elsevier talked to the groups about the different forms of peer review and gave advice on getting published and how to target research to the right journal. Ellen Raphael talked about Sense about Science, discussing projects and the ways we correct misinformation with examples from the last five years. Claire Bithell, from the Science Media Centre (SMC) gave her top tips on how to prepare for an interview and how the SMC works as a press office for science.

“Very engaging and useful talks.”

“Motivated me to practically tackle scientific awareness in the public.”

“Very interesting and diverse speakers”

Audience members on third session

All in all it was a very lively and informative day. Roll on the next one! To read audience reviews of the day please see links in the right hand menu. Here are some selected comments:

“Thanks for a fantastic day and a brilliant opportunity!”

“An excellent day - thank you for your effort and input!”

“A really worthwhile and informative day!”

The next workshop, for early career researchers in the physical sciences and engineering, is taking place on Friday 14th September. For further details or to apply for a place please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Last updated: August 17 2007

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Sense About Science may, from time to time, modify the Policy to reflect legal, technological and other developments. In that event the changes will appear at this location. We recommend you regularly check of the Policy in order to remain aware of the contents of the latest version.
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Sense About Science will regularly update you with details which may be of interest to you. If you do not wish to receive such updates you may contact us. On request you may also request details of all data Sense About Science has compiled about you. Requests for a copy of subjects information will be responded to within 40 calendar days with a maximum charge of £10 to process the request. The 40-day period starts when the fee and information to verify the identity of the person have been received.

Last updated: June 19 2007

Portraying science to the wider public

Nicole Kane is an MRC-funded postdoc at the Centre for Reproductive Biology, Edinburgh

Like other members of the public, I enjoy keeping abreast of current issues in the media. However, face me with the scenario that my research could be subjected to media scrutiny and I would run a mile.

Why?

Scientists are acutely aware of some recent heinous crimes within the media, for example, the still prevalent debacle of the MMR scandal. Personally, I have many opinions about science journalists and talking to the media: that journalists habitually misrepresent not only the scientist but scientific research; that by talking to the media I could affect my research funding—or just that I may sound completely stupid in the eyes of my colleagues!

Thankfully I attended a VoYS (Voice of Young Science) workshop called Standing Up for Science, where these ill-informed notions were crushed. The workshop, organised by Sense About Science and attended by other like-minded early postdoctoral and PhD students, was split into three sessions. Our first session was a very enthusiastic discussion with three highly distinguished scientists well acquainted with standing in the media spotlight: Dr Stephen Minger, a pioneer in Stem Cell research and the Director of the Stem Cell Biology lab; Dr Azra Ghani, a reader in infectious disease epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and Dr Steven Keevil, a medical physicist with considerable experience in medical applications of magnetic resonance imaging. All three panellists shared their anecdotal experiences with the media, both good and bad. They stressed that overall their experiences had been very positive and encouraged us all to embrace media interactions.

During lunch we were asked to discuss how we thought the media could do it better. This exercise ensured that we were armed with several questions and suggestions for our next panellists - the journalists: Anjana Ahuja, a feature writer and science columnist for The Times; Rachael Buchanan, a medical producer for BBC News; Fiona MacRae, the science reporter at the Daily Mail and Alok Jha, science correspondent for the Guardian. We were given the opportunity to voice our concerns and grievances about science reporting. For me, this was the most informative session of the day. The journalists explained how a science story is assembled, and that their job involves finding and making accessible sellable stories and controversial debates – all within a very tight deadline.

The journalists’ responses to our concerns and our very enthusiastic discussion made us re-evaluate our opinions. When confronted by the delegates on misrepresentation the journalists were vociferous in their defence - they get the information for the stories from us, the scientists, whose responsibility is to be able to convey our research to any audience. So if we can’t ensure that the journalists have the story correct, who is really to blame for misrepresentation? This of course is not true for all situations, but highlights a fundamental problem in the relationship between science and the media. Science journalists do not set out to ruin or misrepresent the science, they are trying to highlight what they and others feel are important discoveries and tell their audience about them.

Our final session was concerned with the tools available to us for dealing with research in the public eye. First we were advised how best to get our research published in a peer-reviewed journal. We then discussed ways in which we could stand up for science through Sense About Science, a charitable trust founded to promote an evidence-based approach to science issues in the public domain and challenge bad science. Finally, we found out about the work of the Science Media Centre (SMC). The SMC is often the link between journalists in the national press and scientists. The SMC also provides support for scientists, should we be faced with media interest in our work, and can advise on the best course of action.

So, after the workshop I now feel that the onus is on ourselves to portray our science to the wider public. If we are unable to do this, how can we expect journalists who are not the experts to do the same? We all have a common aim - to promote good science. We have a responsibility, as do the media. As scientists we need to stop hiding behind those stereotypical lab coats and safety glasses, put down the armoury of our pipettes, embrace a relationship with journalists and use all the tools available to us to reach the members of society who, like myself, enjoy pouring over the latest stories.

Last updated: July 03 2007

Science in the media: damage control or public engagement?

Gemma Phillips is a PhD student at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Spreading awareness and a sense of responsibility among young scientists is both key to changing the culture of mistrust of the media in the scientific community and is the fundamental ethos of the VoYS (Voice of Young Science) arm of Sense about Science. Equally important in the wider context of science communication is the work that Sense About Science do in reacting to continued misrepresentation of scientific information in the public domain, not just in the news media.

What is it that scientists are looking to get out of interaction with the media? Should we be relying on them to give all the relevant facts straight? Or should we be looking to find other ways to engage the public in science, where we can have interactive dialogue, perhaps to use the skills that journalists have to draw public attention but to sustain their interest through other means?

The scientists who spoke to us showed that media work can be fun, with potentially positive effects on your career progression and can in fact, at times, be used to promote issues that you feel are under-exposed in the public or political arena. However, it is difficult as an early-career scientist to feel that the work that you do could ever be of interest to the news media. This feeling was not really abated by the panel of journalists at the workshop. They described to us how they find science stories on a daily basis for the news, or over the longer term for feature articles and opinion articles. They also answered the concerns that the audience of young scientists raised about how their work and science generally is handled in the media.

Amongst these issues were a perceived lack of follow-up to breaking stories; balancing the representation of debates as well as getting the basic facts right; the input of editors and how headlines can misrepresent the underlying message of the research being reported. One journalist commented that they strive to be fair in their representation of a story, giving the consensus view rather than balancing the majority view with and extreme but uncommon view. This is good to hear, especially because it seems that this may not have always been the case. But at the end of the day these journalists are paid to interpret current affairs for the reader, to entertain and stimulate them, not to give them a science lesson.

It is clear to me now that scientists must become more willing and better equipped to communicate science to the media in order to ensure that good science underpins the stories in the news, and this is certainly happening. However, I think that the message that I took away from the workshop is that learning how to engage with the media and to help journalists report good science in their articles should not be the end goal for scientist who are just beginning to enter the arena of science communication. We must acknowledge that journalists are not there to act as a decoder for scientists and their work. These ideas are at the core of the rising field of science communication – but I have managed to make it into my PhD before really hearing about them and of opportunities for me get involved.

This sentiment is one that was also voiced by other young scientists at the BAAS Science Communication Conference in May. Initiatives like FameLab and Voice of Young Science show that the situation may be changing. But there is still a lot more opportunity to get young scientists to think about and act on ideas for engaging directly with members of the public of all ages, both to make scientific understanding a tool for everyday life and to enthuse young people at school age about science.

I arrived at the VoYS workshop with the opinion that science is often misrepresented in the media because journalists care more about sensational stories than about getting the facts straight. I left happily reassured that the large majority of journalists see misinformation as bad practice and pride themselves on communicating science stories accurately and engagingly to their readers. Equally I learnt that the responsibility for good reporting of scientific issues lies as much with scientists, who need to make themselves available to journalists at the crucial times and to be clear, concise and accurate in providing the facts, figures and opinions.

Last updated: June 27 2007

Dear Scientist, what is the price of milk?

Betina Ip is a PhD student at Oxford University Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics.

Stephen Minger’s mother has made a video clip of all his appearances on TV. The problem is they all show the same thing: a guy in a white lab coat pipetting. Minger, who has come a long way since his graduate years as a lab rat, is now the media savvy Director of Stem Cell research at King’s College, London. At the recent Sense about Science VoYS (Voice of Young Science) workshop he and a group of distinguished scientists and journalists jostled for a common ground on how science is represented in the media. Hottest concerns for a young audience of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers were whether science was professionally mangled by journalists and how to control for scientific accuracy. So, who are these guys in the white lab coats?

Strategic use of visual props such as white lab coats prepares the viewer for a clip on scientific content, explains Rachael Buchanan from BBC News. This fits well into the public preconception of a laboratory scientist and preps the viewer for upcoming information on science. Such stereotyping has the positive effect of immediate visual cueing, but at the same time promotes the image of a geek scientist, who doesn’t even know ‘how much the milk costs’. For journalists this is a superficial trade-off, which is acceptable, as long as the clip’s content is efficiently communicated. But luckily this is where the manipulation stops.

Contrary to what was feared by the audience, journalists defended their adherence to what is scientifically accurate. “Accuracy is as much their professional standard as the scientists”, says Alok Jha, Guardian science writer. Often, a cut-throat deadline prevents proofreading from scientists involved. However, if mistakes are done, “an honest apology” usually soothes all hurt feelings, suggests Anjana Ahuja feature writer from the Times. Journalists are as fallible as scientists, and the media is the best way to get the public’s attention. How has it been put to use?

The answer is, pretty much as it suits you. While Dr Steve Keevil of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital used targeted media attention to force the issue of magnetic resonance imaging onto the government’s agenda, publicity friendly Stephen Minger has been accused of “publishing his best research in the Times or Guardian”. But what does a scientist do when asked unwanted questions on live camera? “Just keep swearing- the material will be unusable” pitched Dr Azra Ghani, researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. This is not to say that some scientists do not get a certain rush from being the centre of attention.

So, science and media, thumbs up or thumbs down? The current trend is going upwards for science and media in the UK. Organizations such as the Science Media centre cater towards journalists and scientists alike, and independent quality control from Sense about Science, an independent charity, encourage even celebrities to think twice about pseudoscientific statements. With these structures in place, we can feel content that the first steps towards good science reporting have been done and done well. And as a graduate student in the sciences I can say that price of a pint of milk is exactly 69 pence, and the price of good science reporting is becoming increasingly affordable.

Last updated: July 03 2007

VoYS NESTA Crucible 2006

9th July 2006

This was the second year that Sense About Science has run its VoYS media workshop as part of the NESTA Crucible LAB weekend.

First session: Science in the media. Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, Head of the Division of Developmental Genetics at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London, spoke about the pitfalls and rewards of speaking to the media with particular reference to animal testing and embryonic stem cell research.

Second session: What journalists are looking for. Alok Jha, science correspondent for The Guardian, and Vivienne Parry described what it was like to work for a national newspaper and the time pressures they are under to write stories. They included a break down of what a typical working day at a newspaper is like and also responded to the audiences concerns about the media.

Third session: Talking about unpublished and published research. Dr Claire Bithell from the Science Media Centre gave a rundown of ‘dos and don’ts’ when dealing with the media. Then Dr Joanne Baker, an editor at Science, gave the inside track on how papers are chosen by journal editors to be put forward to peer review, and how early career scientists can improve their papers’ chances of being published.

For more information about the Crucible LAB programme please visit the NESTA website.

Last updated: January 17 2007

VoYS November 2006

Organised by Sense About Science, in association with Elsevier, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry and The Royal Academy of Engineering.

Voice of Young Science workshop (physical sciences and engineering)

17th November 2006

Sense About Science’s seventh VoYS media workshop was held at the Institute of Physics and was for physical sciences and engineering early career researchers. Thirty-nine participants were selected with representatives from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. All were keen to hear what our panellists had to say about science and the media and to bring their own experiences into the discussion.

In the first session, Science in the Media, we heard from Professor Jim Al-Khalili, who holds a chair in the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey and is also a Professor of Physics, Dr Andrea Sella, lecturer in the Chemistry Department at University College London and Dr Mark Miodownik, lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at King’s College London and head of the Materials Research Group; Dr Simon Singh chaired the session.

Next came the journalists - Mark Henderson, science editor for The Times, Rachael Buchanan, science producer for BBC News and James Randerson, science correspondent for The Guardian. The session started with the audience outlining their concerns about how the media operate. The journalists responded with a robust defence of their profession and gave insights into what it is like to work in a news room with its fast turn around and short deadlines. They also covered what early career researchers can do to help journalists produce better stories. The session helped the audience to understand the conditions journalists work under and how they could better work together.

In the final session, Talking about published and unpublished research, David Tempest, Associate Director of Research & Academic Relations at Elsevier gave practical advice on how to improve the chances of getting work published as well as highlighting the importance of peer review and how pre-publication was affecting media coverage of science papers. Lyndal Gully, Engineering Press Officer at the Science Media Centre then gave her top tips for dealing with the media.

Last updated: June 26 2007

Interview with Dr Carly Stevens

Author of the paper ‘Impact of nitrogen on the species richness of grasslands’ published in Science in March 2000 (full biog)

You first started dealing with the media during your PhD when your paper was submitted to Science, is that right?
After the initial press conference did you get a lot of media enquiries?
Since then have you done any more media stuff?
Have you been asked to comment on other people’s research?
Would you say that your media experience was good? Did you have any bad stories?
Thinking about yourself back then and the experience you gained in your dealings with the media, what do you wish you had known before you started?

You first started dealing with the media during your PhD. Is that right?

CS: About midway through my PhD I had some really exciting results. I went to a meeting with Science Magazine, obviously a really top journal, and they asked me if I would do a press conference for them but I didn’t really have any concept of what that meant at all. I didn’t go looking to get my work into the media, it was completely unexpected.

You submitted that to Science?

CS: Yes, and it got accepted. Science held a press conference for my paper. I was so lucky because I was at the Open University at the time and they had a press officer who took me under his wing and looked after me and helped me with writing press releases. We had press releases going out from the university, from Science magazine, from the research council and suddenly my life had gone from sitting at my desk analysing data to writing press releases and dealing with the media. It was a complete change.

So after that initial press conference you started to get a lot of media enquiries?

CS: Yes, first I gave a press conference in London and all the major newspapers and newsgroups came along. In some ways that was a good thing as it dealt with a lot of people in one go, but at the time I don’t think I really appreciated that. I got back to my office after the press conference to excited calls from my office mates saying “Nature has been on the phone, can you call them back?” and “so and so newspaper has called”, we never expected anything like that. I was really dumped in the deep end. I was doing radio interviews over the phone, and all sorts. We got on the front page of The Guardian and every major newspaper ran it the next day. Within a few days it had a knock-on effect and we had local press coming back to us to get the local angle, and international press, international radio stations. It really spread.

Since then have you done any more media stuff?

CS: I haven’t done much. I have had the odd journalist call me up for a comment. Nothing much. Because I am a young scientist who people know about, I have done quite a few things like career profiles for various organisations trying to promote ecology, or promote various aspects. Obviously the universities, particularly the Open University, are quite keen to use me as an example so I think once people have got your details you are called upon when people need you for that sort of thing.

You said you got the odd call. Is that to comment on other people’s research?

CS: Yes, what I found is that after the initial paper I had a few calls to comment on things and generally they weren’t really things that were in my field that I could comment on. It seemed a bit hit and miss. They asked me to comment on the algae in the Diana memorial fountain. I appreciate it’s hard for non-experts to understand, but it is absolutely nothing to do with what I do. I know nothing about algae although I guess I know a bit more than someone who knows nothing about biology. After a while it slowed down and stopped and I dropped off the list. Having been in the media for such a specific topic, a single event, that’s the way it goes.

Would you say that your media experience was good? Did you have any bad stories?

CS: I don’t know if I was lucky. We were very careful to make sure we explained things thoroughly and if journalists wanted to talk to us we did talk to them. We didn’t have any bad or vastly inaccurate stories that came out. We took a lot of care to ensure we explained things in a way non-scientists could understand. Having help with things like writing press releases was really good as the media-related person I was working with didn’t know anything about science at all really. He would say “Well that’s all very well but I haven’t got a clue what you are talking about” and so I guess that’s partly why we had such a good experience. Overall it was really positive. I’m not sure it has benefited my career in any way, but looking back it was good. I did find it all a bit worrying at the time.

Thinking about yourself back then and the experience you gained in your dealings with the media, what do you wish you had known before you started?

CS: I had heard so many horror stories. ‘Watch out you will get misquoted’ or ‘they’ll just make things up’. Journalists had really been made out to be the bad guys to me but I certainly didn’t have that experience at all and any mistakes that were made I believe were genuine errors in reporting. They were not journalists setting out on their own story or having their own agenda. I think if I could have been told you don’t have to worry about that at all, that you just have to go out there and tell your story as clearly as possible, it would have made it a lot less stressful. I was dumped in the deep end a little and everyone was nice and genuinely trying to get an understanding of everything.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Dr Milo Shaffer

Lecturer in nanomaterials chemistry at Imperial College, London and visiting lecturer on Cranfield’s MSc in nanotechnology programme (full biog)

How did you first come into contact with the media? Did you have any experience when you were a PhD student?
After you were listed as one of the experts on the Imperial website, did your number of media hits increase?
Have you ever been directly quoted in an article?
Are you asked to speculate a lot with nanotech?
Do you mind people asking you to speculate like that or do you get a bit exasperated with people phoning you?
What advice would you give to young scientists if they are asked to speculate?
What do you wish you had had known?

How did you first come into contact with the media? Did you have any experience when you were a PhD student?

MS: I don’t think so, it all started later on really.

So how did that happen?

MS: I think I was contacted out of the blue more-or-less. Obviously working in nanotechnology, it is rather a hot topic at the moment. People cast around for the nearest convenient person who will answer questions that relate to something they are trying to write an article about, so different people approached me for comment about different things. Most of it was perhaps of a technical nature, to comment on some paper that had come out or some new discovery that had been reported so they want comment on the applications or the practicalities or just something to fill in the space in their article.

So was that before or after you were listed as one of the experts on the Imperial website?

MS: I think it was before, because I think I did a few when I was at Cambridge, I’m not quite sure how they got hold of me.

After you were listed, did your number of media hits increase?

MS: I don’t get very many, maybe one every month or two, something like that. Or maybe even less. I don’t think it has made a lot of difference. One thing I didn’t say was that you could ring me up before 8 in the morning so I don’t get the breaking news type things. Perhaps I should, perhaps it would be interesting. So it is more people preparing feature articles and things like that.

So have you ever been directly quoted in an article?

MS: Yes, several times although I can’t remember the specific quotes now. There was one about self-cleaning clothes. Somebody invented titanium-filled polymer filaments which has a self cleaning photo catalytic process so it removes dirt from itself, and so there was the old man in the white suit type story, which makes a nice story. And of course there is a similar sort of argument which says that if it eats dirt it may also eat the suit itself. So they just wanted some comment to go with that about whether it was practical to have this cleaning process. I can’t remember exactly what I said but it was probably something along the lines of “yes, photocalysis on titanium does work”.

So you’re asked to speculate a lot with nanotech aren’t you?

MS: Yes, or at least what usually happens is that people ring up and speculate wildly and then I have to be rather sensible and down to earth. I had one recently where somebody rang me and said “Ha! Well I’ve just read this paper and I conclude that I can make a suspension bridge that is entirely transparent and see-through, and can you comment about this”, and I replied, “Well, how did you get to that idea?” and eventually it came to pointing out that essentially he was trying to make something that was inherently black, so it wasn’t going to work. Then he was a bit depressed. I guess that’s quite a common thing when some of the stories are done; to be a bit more down to earth about the realities of whatever the topic is in hand.

The trouble is that it doesn’t always go down terribly well, or at least it’s not what the other person wants to hear because they would like to make a more exciting story. So it makes a less exciting story. I mean the response I’ve had mostly, because I’ve spoken to science writers, has been oh well fair enough, “It’s a fair cop, gov”. I don’t know if there are other types of situations where you get them quoting something random and saying that you are responsible. That might happen I suppose but I’ve never had that.

So do you mind people asking you to speculate like that or do you get a bit exasperated with people phoning you?

MS: No, it’s usually quite entertaining. What crazy idea have they come up with this time? And sometimes you go “Ohh, well actually, maybe we should do that, that’s an interesting idea.” I mean it’s quite fun speculating, thinking on your feet. Again you want to be fairly confident that you’re talking to someone who is sympathetic, because if you are just thinking on your feet it is easy to say something which is actually ridiculous really, so you want to be able to have a chance to review what your conclusions of that discussion are. I guess you tend to feel freer to do that with someone you have spoken to before, and so you know that they are trustworthy. You know that when they say “oh we’ll send you the quote before we publish it”, that they do indeed send you the quote.

I have quite often had people send me stuff before they put it out, and let me have a go at editing, which I know is not the normal format. Whether I just sound approachable, or convince them that I won’t insert enormous amounts of gobble-de-gook into their work, I’m not sure, but I usually get away with that. And when I do that, I am extremely careful not to change the length of the sentences that they have included or add any technical words. But what you find quite often is that what they have written is actually incorrect and by the smallest of tweaks you can make it correct.

Just thinking about young scientists who haven’t had that much exposure to the media, what advice would you give to them if they are asked to speculate?

MS: Well don’t if you’re not comfortable with it. Don’t say something which you might later regret. As I say, be careful of who it is you are speculating with and if you are not comfortable just stick to what you had decided you were going to talk about in advance. So go back to the things you are confident about and say “Well, I don’t know whether that would be practical, however this is an interesting thing you can do” and then talk about what you want to talk about.

What do you wish you had had known?

MS: I don’t know. I don’t feel like I have had any terrible experiences. It is hard to remember what you thought beforehand. As you go through it you get a better idea of what it is they are interested in and how the mechanics of it happen. I haven’t had very many really complicated situations so I can imagine that might have been slightly different if that had come up. I think that the main thing to bear in mind is just to know what you want to say in advance. If there is something you want to say, if they give you something to comment on you could get the research in advance and give yourself a moment to reflect on it and decide what is your view on it rather than doing it on the hop. You can also look a few things up as well if you need to.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Other scientists’ experiences

In our media-friendly society most scientists will have had some media experience, be it good, bad or ugly. Here you can read some of these experiences. If you have a story you’d like to add please email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Professor Adam Finn

Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Bristol (full biog)

“One aspect of science journalism you do not mention is what you might call the “iterative journalistic science myth” which is a variant of lazy journalism recently exacerbated by the internet. Of course scientists are often guilty of this. We cite references we have not properly read or believe things we read in text books uncritically. But journalists can be far worse and what they write is more widely read.

Here is my best example:

In late 2000, I was called by a freelance journalist who writes, or wrote then, for The Sunday Mirror. He had heard about a child who had died of varicella and was surprised to learn the disease could be fatal. He’d also heard that there was a vaccine against chickenpox which was not in use in the UK and wanted to talk to someone who knew about it, thinking there was a story in this somehow. At that time I was working in Sheffield. We talked for nearly an hour - presumably he took notes. Among other things, I told him that the logical way to give varicella vaccine would be combined with MMR in an MMRV vaccine and that trials of such formulations had been going on for some time and were currently ongoing to my knowledge in Australia and Germany.

No piece appeared. Then about 3 months later, coincident with a ripple in the Wakefield/MMR saga concerning the “dangers” of combining M M and R together, a small story appeared on about page 10+ of the Sunday Mirror along the lines of “shock horror, as if MM & R mixing was not bad enough, get this, they are doing a study of an MMRV vaccine on children in Sheffield…” Presumably the notes had been dug out and pieced together…wrong. Although my name was mentioned in the piece and I was in Sheffield and contactable on a bleep that weekend, the story was reproduced in 3 of the 4 quality daily newspapers the following day without anyone attempting to contact me to verify it. The national TV broadcasters then contacted me to get interviews (which is how I heard about it), but, of course, lost interest in it totally when I told them it was fiction.

I wrote to the 4 newspapers and told them of their mistake. None replied. I thought that was the end of it.

However the story resurfaced in Private Eye some months later - naming me and Sheffield. I wrote to them, they published a small retraction. After a further silence, they published an “MMR Special Edition” in May 2002 and in it published a “cutting” of their earlier piece about which they had already published a retraction. I wrote to them again and this time they published my letter in their correspondence column. But the mythical study was by now journalistic and internet fact. Try putting “MMRV Sheffield” into Google. The story came round again in The Sunday Times in Dec 2003 and may have surfaced at other times without my hearing about it.

There now is a widely held belief that the only MMRV study ever done in the UK was done by me in Sheffield. Colleagues frequently ask me for details of the results! Amusingly enough an MMRV vaccine, manufactured by Merck was licensed in the US last week! Nothing to do with me I hasten to add!”

biography

Professor Adam Finn is a Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Bristol. He trained in medicine at Cambridge and Oxford. He trained in Paediatric Infectious Diseases in Philadelphia, USA and in Immunology at Great Ormond St., London. He currently works in these specialities at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children and runs a research programme which aims to understand how children make immune responses to common bacteria, working towards development of new approaches to prevention of common infections using vaccines.

Last updated: October 05 2006

VoYS media guide

Standing up for Science

Standing up for Science is a lively, informal guide to the inner workings of the media with practical tips about how early career scientists can get involved.

The guide has been developed by a team of early career scientists who, after attending VoYS workshops, wanted to share insights into how to talk about their research and improve the science in public discussions.

The team, armed with a list of concerns from their peers and their own insights from the workshops, interviewed scientists, journalists and press officers across the country to find out what they thought early career scientists should know about the media and myths and fears about how they work.

The result is Standing up for Science, a guide to the media for early career scientists by early career scientists.

We’d like to thank our partners for their help and input into the guide.

How to navigate the web resource

During the development of Standing up for Science the VoYS writing team collected so much material that we couldn’t fit it into the 12-page booklet! The additional materials are available here:

Interactive PDF of Standing up for Science By clicking on the links in the document you can access the full interviews and biographies for all the contributors as well as the VoYS writing team biographies and Partners’ details. Alternatively, you can follow the links below or the menu in the side menu bar:

Contributors’ full interview transcripts and biographies

Read other scientists’ experiences of the media

Meet the VoYS writing team

Information about our partners and their comments about the guide

Find out more about the VoYS network and how you can get involved

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The background story

Since 2004, VoYS media workshops have been responding to early career scientists’ concerns and fears about the media head on. These range from queries as to why not all science journalists have science backgrounds, to accusations of misrepresentation of science by the media. These workshops have been very successful; they are always oversubscribed with 100% attendance rates and consistently get over 85% of participants rating them either good or excellent on the feedback forms.

Many of our participants want to go on and spread the word about getting involved in public debates about science to their friends and colleagues. In response to this Sense About Science created the VoYS network, which operates to support early career scientists wanting to make their voices’ heard in public debates about science; and also Standing up for Science which can be distributed to early career scientists across the country and provides insight into how the media reports science and gives practical tips on how to get more involved in public debates about science.

To make sure Standing up for Science reflected the concerns of early career scientists, it was developed with the help of the VoYS writing team. The VoYS writing team members come from a range of different science disciplines, at different stages in their careers and are from across the country. They have been involved in everything to do with the development of the guide; from interviewing contributors to deciding on the design and layout to final proof reading.

Through our partners, on the eve of release, Sense About Science had already distributed over 8,500 copies of Standing up for Science to early career scientists across the country and is already getting orders for more from university departments wanting to distribute them to their postgraduate students. It is freely available on the internet as well as in hardcopy (within the UK), these can be ordered by contacting Alice Tuff at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or 0207 478 4380.

Last updated: August 30 2007

Interview with Fiona MacRae

Science Reporter for The Daily Mail (full biog)

How do journalists get their science stories?
How do you decide which stories to pitch for that day’s paper?
How do you find the scientists you want to talk to for a story?

How do journalists get their science stories?

FM: Many stories come from journals, with Nature, Science and New Scientist three of the main sources for science articles. Websites such as EurekAlert! also provide access to embargoed articles from a range of journals. Stories also come from contacts, charities, freelance journalists, press releases and surveys. Other sources include ring-ins from readers, articles in other newspapers and magazines and original ideas.

How do you decide which stories to pitch for that day’s paper?

FM: I look for stories that would appeal to a wide range of people - subjects that somehow capture the imagination. These may be particularly topical or deal with something that affects their day-to-day lives.

It is also important to consider whether the story is under embargo. Is it something that all our rivals are likely to run the next day or is it something we can keep for the upcoming Bank Holiday?

How do you find the scientists you want to talk to for a story?

FM: If I am writing about an article from a journal, I will try to contact the researchers behind the study. I am often put in touch with scientists by the Science Media Centre which has a vast data base of media-friendly experts in all sorts of areas. Other names and numbers come from colleagues, charities, university press offices and museums such as the London’s Natural History Museum. All of these things help me to build up my own database of scientists who are knowledgeable in particular areas, easy to contact and happy to help.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Alok Jha

Science Correspondent for The Guardian (full biog)

Do you think it is ok for non-scientists to write science stories?
Do you feel comfortable writing stories that are outside of your subject area?
Is it different interviewing for feature articles than it is interviewing for news pieces?
Do you get time to check your stories properly?
Can you take us through a normal day at The Guardian?
How do you respond to claims that journalists ‘sex up’ stories?
Do you think it is important for young scientists to talk to the media?
How do you respond to young scientists who think they are not ‘expert’ enough for you?
What makes a good interviewee?
What practical advice would you give to a young scientist being interviewed by a journalist?
Would your news editor be happy for you to use young scientists?
What do you think about journalists claiming that their articles are balanced when they put all of their qualifying statements at the end?

Do you think it is ok for non-scientists to write science stories?

AJ: Yes, I think it is really important for non-scientists to get involved. Science is a community of people that includes scientists and communicators and so on. You’ve got to have people who haven’t got any background involved otherwise how do you spread the message? You’ll just be talking to people who know what you’re talking about all the time, and no one else will be listening. That’s the philosophical answer. The practical answer is if it is just people that do science asking the questions then they won’t always ask the right questions that non-scientists want asked.

Do you feel comfortable writing stories that are outside of your subject area?

AJ: Absolutely, I try and write biology stories more than physics stories. I love physics, it’s great, but it’s hard to get physics into a newspaper. I think it is easier for me to ask simple questions in biology because I really don’t know what the subject matter is at all. And, if you think about it, in general, biologists don’t know anything about physics and vice versa, so we are all outside of our fields in some respects. Even scientists are non-scientists when they are out of their fields.

Is it different interviewing for feature articles than it is interviewing for news pieces?

AJ: I would say there is no direct difference; there is a continuum I suppose. If you are doing a news piece you know it is because a paper has come out or something has happened, the story kind of writes itself. You say this has happened one, two, three, four. You get some quotes to show that you haven’t made it up and usually quotes can be quite colourful, so you can use that as part of a really strong opening, saying scientists are angry or happy, to get some emotion in there.

But this all has to be done really quickly, in about four hours, so you try and keep the interviews as short as possible, and pretty much in news stories you know what you want people to say. You know that you’re going to phone up someone and get a quote that is going to be a little bit inflammatory or angry. I’m not saying that because we construct the story, but because we kind of know what the story is already and how people are going to react to it. If it is just a paper that has come out in a journal, you just want them to explain what it is they have done with soundbites and then it’s done.

For a feature it’s a different type of thing, because you don’t know the story before you start usually. You’ve got an idea that this is an interesting area to research, an interesting area to write about, it’s been in the news maybe.

So you ring up lots of people, and sometimes you won’t even use the quotes that you get. You just want them to give you an idea, “am I right about this?” or sound people off. You could speak to them for half an hour and only then will they start to give you good quotes; when they are warmed up and a bit calm, and they are giving you open-ended answers.

In news articles you want open-ended answers that are two or three sentences, for features you want them to talk for as long as they can. And everything they say informs something else. They might tell you to read this paper or talk to this person, so you amass a lot of information and find a narrative.

But then there are a whole range of intermediate levels. You might be writing a news story which is quite confusing, so you might end up talking to someone for 10 minutes, from which you might only use two minutes. The general difference is for news stories you keep it short and for features you just let them talk because no one person is going to give you all of the answers.

Do you get time to check your stories properly?

AJ: As far as checking facts is concerned, you’re hoping that you check your facts as you go along and that your sources are accurate and valid. If I am interviewing a Professor of Physics at Cambridge University and he tells me something, I probably won’t check that because I trust that he knows what he is talking about. Unless it is a controversial issue, in which case what I will probably do is check with a few other people and get some kind of consensus view. What I never do is check things in encyclopaedias to check they are right, because that is their job. If I think something is wrong or if I think I have misheard something then of course I will check it but as a matter of course no.

If it is someone who is controversial, someone who says they have found a way of making free unlimited energy, something that clearly goes against the rules of physics, which happens quite alot, there is no way I can prove this is right or wrong. But, what I can do is put the quotes to a much more established figure and say, ‘can you tell me what the science establishment thinks and can you tell me your own personal opinions on this piece of research?’

There is an argument to say that is misrepresentative of what is happening, because you are only quoting one person from each side. But, I think people who read articles like this understand that, as long as you make it clear that this is not what scientists think. What they don’t want is a 200 word section of scientists demolishing what you have just told them. What you have to remember is that any scientific article is not outlining scientist arguments; it’s giving them a story to read.

I do not check quotes unless someone is really uncomfortable speaking to me and they ask to. But as a rule no, because scientists never come back on time and even if you say to them “I want you to check this for factual errors, I’m happy to change factual errors” they’ll always come back with stylistic points. It is quite nice to get people to say things off the cuff, because it sounds more natural and if they have time to edit it, it makes it sound really stilted, and it sounds really odd in the context of an article where everyone is talking in normal speech.

Plus also, sometimes people come back to you and say “Well actually what I said doesn’t make sense or I’m not happy with it”. That’s a bit more difficult because you don’t want to make people say things they don’t want to say, but you have to remember that when you speak to a journalist it is on the record. If you don’t want it on the record, you have to say at the beginning, “I’ll tell you this but I’m not comfortable with this being on the record”. If it is someone you trust, and you are telling them that information then they will honour that, because they want to keep their reputation and you are doing them a favour by talking to them. But you never ask unless you really need it for some reason.

Can you take us through a normal day at The Guardian

AJ: Normally, you would know what your diary stories are, anything in the journals, any press conferences, events, lectures, press releases that kind of thing. Say for today, last night at about 5 o’clock we will have sent the news desk today’s diary. This is what is happening in the world of science today. Sometimes there is loads and sometimes there is absolutely nothing. This morning we will have a meeting with them where they will go through all of the days news stories, and we will pick the stories we want to do.

Some stories are obvious, we’ll know days in advance we are going to do a major Nature paper or something, and may have prepared some stuff in advance. Others we’re not sure of, so we will discuss them and by about 10 o’clock we will start working on a certain number of stories.

Then about 12 o’clock they have another meeting to decide what goes where, how things are looking and what space everything is going to get. And at that stage you know you’re definitely doing these two stories and they are going to have this much space and you’re in the home straight. So for most of the day we really don’t know how long our stories are going to be, how much space they are going to get, if there is going to be a picture with them, so we are really shooting in the dark.

So what we are doing in the morning is interviewing and just working on the assumption that it is going to be about 500 words long, so therefore you can cut it down easily or add another 300 words to it easily. About 3 o’clock we know what we are doing, we can file about 4 or 5, so we need to speak to people by about 2 or 3. Sometimes we can’t speak to people until 4; that’s ok, we’ll have the story written, but then we will speak to you at 4 and quickly file extra stuff. Then it gets edited and subbed, goes through the system, which takes about 3 or 4 hours, and gets printed at about 7 or 8 in the evening.

Sometimes at 2 or 3 something major will happen and everything gets shoved back, and so when you have spoken to a scientist all morning and taken up half an hour of their time, they’ll see their story doesn’t appear or they are not quoted. This is usually because something else has happened which has shoved everything else, because it is a dynamic newspaper and things get changed all night.

What we tee up often is interviews, so we ring up in the morning and say can we talk to you now or can we talk to you at 2 when you are back from lunch. If we know it is a big paper we try to get interviews a few days before, but it is really hard to do that as you will be working on the stories for that day. That means you can get stories filed early so you can get extra stuff as well. Things like the news wires also really help as well; the copy wires will write stories based on all of the diary stuff, so it helps to get quotes from there.

If something major breaks for us, like Hwang resigning at three o’clock in the afternoon, then the foreign desk will come over and say we need this on the front page. So you have to either dump all the stuff you are doing and start again, or you have to finish all that stuff by 2 and then do other stuff for the new story. Because if it is news you can’t not cover it, even if you are stretched and you have to prioritise a little.

While all that Hwang stuff was happening, I remember we had been working all day and the news came over the wire, he’s resigned, he’s retracted the paper, and it’s a fantastic story, you have to cover that. But we were all doing stories for the next day’s paper, so you have to file stuff really quickly, almost in half an hour, and it really gets pressured like that.

Then you have to find loads of new people, who don’t know what the story is, and say “Right, Hwang has just resigned, tell me what you think about this? What’s happened?” And scientists will always say to you, if something has happened really suddenly, I need a few hours to digest this. So you just say I know you do, but, you know kind of what has happened, here’s what happened, and some scientists are brilliant at that. You can take them through it in 5 minutes and they say “If that is true then I think this…”, and that’s fine to say that, because it is a news story and things change; “if really all these things are lies then I think this…”.

This is where a good scientist will speculate for you really quickly. You want their immediate reaction, you don’t want their considered reaction, you want their immediate “oh dear god this is terrible”. Some people are confident in doing that and it is priceless. It’s alright for us to say this is going to be awful for scientists, but it is even better if a scientist says it. These stories will run and run, so then the next day you will have had some time to consider it and we will talk to you again, so you can have a running commentary over the next few days.

The problem is that only a few scientists are good at this at the moment, so you end up having the same scientists quoted again and again. Then you get scientists coming back to you asking why do you quote the same people again and again, and it is because they work within our schedule. It really isn’t because we think you have to work within our schedule, because this is what we do, literally we have to publish newspapers at 7pm and that’s just how it is.

How do you respond to claims that journalists ‘sex up’ stories?

AJ: Tim Radford used to tell us that any newspaper will only run stories that are interesting to its readers, whatever that story is; politics, fashion or science. Just because a story is important in the world of science, doesn’t mean it is going to get reported. What you have to do if a story is important, if it’s worthy and a bit dull, you still feel you have to report it but you have to make it relevant. Sometimes making something relevant to some people is ‘sexing’ it up.

I think that scientists are a bit hypocritical about this, because scientists are constantly sexing up their own research in their grant proposals, telling you that this is going to be a cure for something. When you are trying to make something relevant to the public, for example if someone has done some stem research which you know is important, there’s no point just telling someone the method, results and conclusions like you can in a journal, that then fits into a larger body of work.

For a reader of a newspaper this article is self-contained. They might know a little bit about stem cell research but that doesn’t matter; you have to assume they know very little about it. But they are intelligent and you can take them through the arguments, and an argument for them is this is what they have done, this is why they have done it, and the why they have done it is to help you get better cures in 20 years. Ok that’s a little speculative, but it’s not wrong and it’s not sexing it up to say in 20 years you’re going to have x and y because of what scientists have done this week. It’s making something relevant to somebody.

Scientists are constantly saying that articles in newspapers and magazines are facile and very simplistic, and glib and shallow and sensationalised. But I would argue that scientists who are good at whatever they do, only got into doing what they do because they found it a bit sexy, interesting and sensational and wonderful and found the wonder of what they do. They have to understand that we are not reporting science for science journals that go on about the next steps in science, we are reporting it to an audience that needs to have a bit more context and a bit more relevance to them.

Do you think it is important for young scientists to talk to the media?

AJ: I don’t think it is important if they don’t want to do it. It is important for us to get more people to talk to. To get more voices and to get different voices, because science is all about debate and the public do not see that at all, for them it is all about facts. So if you have different people saying slightly different things, it would help.

The more people you have talking about science, the more realistic picture you get of science. So you don’t just get Robert Winston saying the same thing about fertility again and again. You get lots of different views; there is a huge swath of different views on stem cells and fertility and you need to reflect that. And it’s not our job, it’s the job of scientists to come forward and say these things, sometimes controversial things.

I think young scientists are quite good at this because they realise how we work and how important it is to communicate. Also if your research is constantly being talked about you’re more likely to get money to do it. I know it’s a bit mercenary, but this is why Stephen Hawking gets millions of pounds for computers even when really what he is doing isn’t relevant to any of us, other than it being fascinating and him being a massive brain. He does a lot of communication stuff, even though he is a top scientist. So I don’t see any reason why someone who is a post-doc somewhere, who probably is much more in tune with what people are thinking these days and how people talk, why they can’t just come out and talk about their research.

How do you respond to young scientists who think they are not ‘expert’ enough for you?

AJ: I’m not an expert either, but you are more expert than me. The most stimulating talks about bits of research I’ve had are with people who think they are not an expert in something and will tell you very clearly what they have done. You don’t want everyone commenting on stem cells and ethics. If someone has done that bit of research they are the expert, and if they can take you through what they have done that is worth millions.

What about more general debates, like GM for example?

AJ: Well if they have something to say then they should say it. Even if that is to just say “I don’t think you should have reported that” or “I think that people are too worried about it.” Because I think it is not only useful for us and the public to hear them, but it is useful for them to understand that just because they sit and think something, it doesn’t mean that everyone else thinks the same as they do.

Lots of scientists might think that there is nothing wrong with GM crops and that actually they’ve been proven safe in a lot of trials, but most members of the public don’t believe that. I’m not saying that scientists are wrong. But it would be good for them to realise that most members of the public don’t believe that and not assume that just because the science has proved something, everyone else believes it as well.

Science is a wonderful thing that has given me confidence in a lot of things in life, but just because something is published in a paper does not mean everyone knows about it. So it is useful if you can articulate why you think, as a human being and a scientist, that GM crops aren’t all that bad for you and you do it in a non patronising way.

What makes a good interviewee?

AJ: Number one, someone who comes back to you on time, that is most important. Someone who actually phones you when they say they are going to phone you or gives you their phone number, or a phone number to ring them on, and doesn’t say I’ll phone you in a few hours and then refuse to give you a number. Basically, somebody who is accessible.

Someone who is ready to explain very simple things, because I will ask really dumb questions, but who is patient enough to say well ok this is what it means. Someone who puts things into context, so they will explain what they’ve done, what their paper is about, but also how it fits into the bigger field of research; why they are doing what they are doing basically.

Someone who gives decent soundbites maybe but that’s not so important. Someone who will speculate a little bit, I don’t mean give you quotes on the biggest science issues of the day, but who will respond to questions along the lines of “You’ve done this research. This has widened this research. Do you think that your new method could widen in the next 20 years?” Even if your answer is “I don’t know, that’s a bit of a leap”, that’s a good answer, that is fine. But not to get angry about it; “You journalists, you’re always going off on tangents.” Frankly, whatever research you do, you’re always going to have some kind of goal, you don’t just work in a vacuum.

Someone who is willing to be good humoured about something, so if someone asks you a silly question you can take it on the chin. If it’s a really technical bit of research that even you can see from the outside seems a little bit nerdy, then if someone asks you “Well, what’s the point in that?”, if you can say “I know it looks a bit nerdy but actually…”.

All of those things really!

What practical advice would you give to a young scientist being interviewed by a journalist?

AJ: For the most part, if you are being interviewed by a journalist for a science story, they are not trying to trip you up, you’ve got to realise that. If it’s not one of these big issues stories, all they want, 99% of the time, is an explanation of either what you have done, or they want your opinion on something that is in your field. They might not be able to contact the scientist who published the paper and they just want your help to explain what on earth it means, so you’re actually doing them a favour by speaking to them.

If you don’t feel comfortable answering a question, then don’t answer it. Just say “I’m sorry I don’t know the answer to that question” or “I’m not in that field”. If you have an idea of who can answer it, tell them. Be honest with them.

Also, if you don’t want them to quote you on something, tell them they shouldn’t quote you beforehand. Frankly, if you say this and then they go ahead and use it anyway, you just don’t have to speak to them again. They know they are going to burn their bridges if they do that. It’s a trust thing.

Be very clear what your expertise is. If, say, you’ve been involved in a bit of research and you’re one of three authors. If you are the only one they can get through to, but you can only comment on one bit of the research, your particular project, just say that.

Try and help them out, it will make them much nicer to you and it will make them treat you much nicer in print. If you like someone as an interviewee, you will never make them come off badly in print. If you are charming as an interviewee, and you give them everything and you’ve been really nice and you’ve phoned back, they will never treat you badly.

In the 1% of the time that you have done something terrible, or someone in your field has done something terrible, and they’re asking for comments on that, you don’t have to talk to anyone. But they will run the story anyway. So I would say it is always better to have your comment, to try and steer the story in a certain way, than to be silent about something. Being silent about something speaks louder volumes, and it allows the journalist to say “We asked this person to speak to us but they wouldn’t.” That sounds terrible.

Would your news editor be happy for you to use young scientists?

AJ: They wouldn’t care. What does it matter? All sorts of scientists through the ages have had their best ideas at 26 and 27. I’m 29, I would much rather speak to a 29 year old than a 50 year old. I know that there is this feeling that if you talk to older scientists they have more knowledge, and of course they do, but also you don’t put people’s ages in copy so it doesn’t matter. It’s about your level of expertise in a certain area.

Older scientists will tend to be more confident, and able to speak to you about all sorts of things. You’re probably more likely to go to Robert Winston if you want a general quote about the state of fertility research, because he has probably seen it all and he’s done enquiries for the House of Lords and spoken in parliament so you want that sort of gravitas. But for the most part what matters is what is said.

Some stories are based on what people say. If, say, Lord Winston says no one should ever have IVF that is brilliant, but it’s not such a great story coming from a young researcher. But, if I want to know if IVF works, it doesn’t matter who tells me.

Or a young fertility researcher saying Robert Winston is really wrong because every woman that I come across says this?

AJ: Well exactly, if you’ve got a bit of human experience that is valuable. Everyone has had different experiences and a range of experiences is important because so far the public see science as right or wrong. If you are going to challenge that view, and it’s more of a debate, you need people to say slightly different things all the time, and come out with these different things.

Don’t get angry when a journalist presents one view because that’s all they could get at that time - we have four hours to come up with something. Remember that the anti-science lobbies are very powerful; they will constantly bombard you with press releases, and particular views on how things are very non-scientific, that IVF and animal research are terrible. If you are silent as scientists then all that you are going to hear from the mainstream press, and I’m not talking about tabloids, is that all animal research is bad or all IVF is evil. You’ve got to speak out. You need to be as loud as the others, and unfortunately the others are very loud.

It’s not good enough for scientists to sit back and say, ‘We are not going to say anything because that’s the way science operates’. That means that all you will hear is the anti-science arguments. We are at a massive war with anti-science movements who are constantly decrying how bad scientists are and how they want to take over the world, and scientists unfortunately clam up and say ‘Oh no, we don’t want to speak. We don’t want to get into this debate.’ But this debate is going on and if you are not going to say anything then you can’t complain that newspapers and members of the public think you are evil. It’s a little bit extreme but you know what I mean.

What do you think about journalists claiming that their articles are balanced when they put all of their qualifying statements at the end and most readers will drop-off halfway through?

There’s the classic article about how black holes are all going to kill us and scientists have found out some mathematical equation that has said that we’re all going to die a horrible death. Then the last sentence is ‘but the chances of this happening are infinitesimally small’. You’ve now covered yourself with this statement at the end, and journalists hide behind it. I agree, it’s a really bad way of doing things.

But any responsible journalists will say that the reason you are writing about it is because it is a controversial view; it’s not a view that all scientists hold. Now there is no responsibility on journalists to get something that is fair and balanced but many journalists who want a good reputation will be as accurate as possible if you are searching for truth. Journalists are never objective. What they can be is as fair as possible to everybody. You are as fair as possible to whoever is making this weird claim and you are as fair as possible to actual claims of the scientific community as well, because who knows what the truth is.

The truth is probably as the scientific community think, but even they’re discovering they’re wrong in lots of cases. I’m not saying I’m arguing against the basic laws of physics or anything or this idea that science is a belief system as some people would say, which I don’t think is true. But there is nothing wrong with using controversial views to actually tell people about the scientific views on things.

So you start off with saying that a perpetual motion machine exists in his lab, but then say that a perpetual motion can’t exist because of these physical laws. What you’ve done is tell people about the laws of thermodynamics. I’m not saying thats what you go out to do, but it’s a useful way of doing it.

A journalist’s job is not to educate, that’s what schools do, but there is an important element of information out there. What we need is young scientists to come out with new ways of telling the same story again and again. If you just ask someone, ‘Do you know realise how important thermodynamics is?’ they won’t care. What you need to do is prove to them that actually if this stuff didn’t exist we wouldn’t know about x y and z and so on, and there are some fabulous people who could do that.

Younger people know more about what their peers think. They have just come into this knowledge, so they are much more able to say ‘This is what people understand and this is what they don’t understand. This is how I learnt this stuff and this how I came to understand what I understand.’

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Mark Henderson

Science Editor of The Times (full biog)

As a non-scientist do you feel qualified to write science stories?
Can you take me through a day in the life of a science journalist on The Times?
When do you know how long your story is going to be?
Do you get time to check your stories?
How do you respond to claims that journalists sex up science stories?
Have you ever misquoted anyone?
For young scientists, is the fear of being misquoted or taken out of context a realistic fear?
Why do headlines sometimes not match the article?
Do you think young scientists should put themselves forward to the media?
What would you say to young scientists who are worried they are not ‘expert’ enough for you?
What do you think makes a good interviewee?
What practical advice would you give a young scientist preparing to be interviewed?

As a non-scientist do you feel qualified to write science stories?

MH: Yes, for a variety of reasons. First of all science is such a broad field that, in a sense, being a specialist in one small bit of it doesn’t necessarily qualify you any better to write about the rest of it than a non-specialist. So, if I had a degree in molecular biology and I was being asked to write about CERN and astrophysics and particle physics and so on, I wouldn’t have any relevant knowledge at all. It’s such a broad field, especially when you are talking about reporting for a general rather than a specialist audience, then I think not being a specialist really isn’t a particular handicap. That said, the one thing I think you really do need to grasp, as a non-specialist, is the method and how it works. You need to work out that science is a process of testing hypotheses, rather than a single body of knowledge. Once this and the way that people reach conclusions have been established, then I think people from any academic background can do it.

Something else that is important is the fact that as a non-specialist you’re not tempted to use jargon. The people you are writing for don’t generally have a background in what you are writing about, and there is always a temptation to assume too much prior knowledge. If you are not a specialist in it yourself, or you don’t have the background, then that is one less temptation to deal with in some respects. I don’t necessarily think it’s a massive advantage or disadvantage. As long as you grasp the method bit, the background isn’t particularly important.

Can you take me through a day in the life of a science journalist on The Times?

MH: Well it depends on the day, but your busy days are midweek days. Wednesday or Thursday are good examples because those are when the big journals come out; Nature on Wednesday and Science on Thursday. So you’ll start by looking at the big embargoed journals coming out that day. You will also look though Eureka Alert which is the AAAS’s embargoed news site, for stories that you think are going to be of interest.

So you see the embargoed copies on Tuesday?

MF: You’ll see them whenever they get put up. You will check Eureka Alert at least every morning, if not before, and usually you will have a glance through it earlier in the week to see what is coming up. Equally you’ll look at the Nature press release, the Science press release etc. in advance of the day so you have some idea what is coming up.

The other thing is that, usually, you’re asked the night before by the forward planning desk for some idea of what you are going to do the following day. You don’t always know everything, but it’s always a good idea to have some idea of what is on the agenda before you get into the office in the morning.

Going back even before that, the very first thing that I do during the day is listen to the Today programme at home and read the papers. I get The Times, Telegraph and Guardian delivered, so, while I’m having my coffee and cereal in the morning, I will look through the papers. I’ll only take half an hour or so, I won’t read them exhaustively, but I’ll make sure I’m aware both of what I’ve got in the paper and what other correspondents have got in my field, and I will keep up with other news. The key thing is flicking through and seeing what’s being done in your field.

Then you will get in to the office and if you haven’t already read the papers and press releases for embargoed things that day you’ll read them. Then before 10.30 I’ll need to brief the news desk on what I am going to do that day. I will give them little potted summaries on two or three or maybe four stories I’m going to do, discuss that and make sure the news editor has understood them. He’ll sometimes have particular questions, or say that he likes that or don’t bother with that. Then at 10.30 he will go into morning conference, which is the meeting of heads of department with the editor and deputy editor, with his list of stories, which he will pitch to them.

Sometimes after morning conference if it’s a story he particularly liked, or it sparked particular interest with the editor or the deputy editor, they’ll come back to you and say ‘Can you do this? Can you make sure that you answer this particular question? Can you take this angle on it? Would it work to do this or that?’ Then through the day you will write your pieces.

One of the things now, certainly on The Times and I think increasingly on other papers, is there’s demand for some papers to be delivered quite early, to keep a copy flow going during the day so pieces can get subbed and pages made early on. Science is particularly amenable to that because a lot of stories are from journals and so they’re things that one can prepare, to a certain degree, in advance. They’re not generally things where you are waiting for an announcement at three o’clock, so one often can file by two, three o’clock. Gradually through the rest of the day, I write up those stories. Unless I’m writing something really big for the front page or page three, I’ll usually be relatively clear of that days stories by about 4-4.30 which is generally when I’ll start making calls about other sorts of things. I’ll start thinking about other sorts of projects I want to do, talk to somebody about an idea and read up papers that aren’t necessarily stories but might give me ideas for something else.

When do you know how long your story is going to be?

MH: You’ve usually got a fairly good idea of whether a story is going to be a page leader or not, even before you pitch it. You know by and large just through experience what characteristics make a page-lead story and whether something is sufficiently interesting or not. Sometimes that’ll change during the day, sometimes somebody will jump all over a story that you didn’t particularly like and want you to write more. Sometimes you’re having to fight for something you think is important.

A page lead, in tabloid format, can be as short as 500 words. But one will usually try to write somewhere between 500 and 700. Occasionally you can go longer than that but it usually has to be quite a big story to get that. Other things that are going to be summary items, what we call super nibs - nibs being news in brief - will be much, much shorter. What there isn’t so much of any more, since we’ve gone tabloid, is scope for a 400 word piece. Most things are either page lead or they’re very short. So you’ll tailor things accordingly and spend more time on the stories that are going to be longer and get a better show in the paper.

You’ll also need to liaise with the picture desk and often, with science, with graphics as well. Then later during the day, check the graphic and make sure there aren’t errors in it, send captions up to the artists doing it, some of whom aren’t necessarily as scientifically literate as they could be.

The other thing to consider is that very often, probably twice a week or so you might have a briefing in the morning somewhere either at the SMC or Royal Society or somewhere like that, which are usually 10 or 10.30. In that case what you’ll do is you’ll ring in, you’ll talk to the news desk, tell them what you’re going to do, tell them where you’re going, also any other items you might have on the agenda. Then you will get back and write everything up later in the day. Then there is a 4 o’clock afternoon conference which is a sort reprise of the morning conference, but looks at how stories have moved during the day, actually working out in a bit more detail what is going on the front, what is going on page three, what’s going on key slots, a sort of progress report almost.

So you don’t get that much time to check your stories?

MH: You have quite a quick turn around on a lot of stories. It depends on the story, but you certainly don’t generally get a day on them. You’re usually talking about an hour or two to digest a story, turn it around, file it. So in terms of doing things like emailing things back to scientists to check and so on, I don’t do it by and large for two reasons. One is just simply time pressure, the other is that you can often actually give people a false sense of security as to what is going to happen. Very often people say they only want to check for accuracy but they will always quibble with your interpretation of things and on top of that of course once the story has left your hands subs can do all sorts of things to it, and that is often very difficult to oversee. It’s usually better just to leave people with the understanding, I find, that I will write it as I see fit.

Very occasionally, if there is something I really don’t understand properly, I will read back relevant sections just to check, but it’s not something I think anyone should expect of journalists both because of time pressure and because it’s just not the way that most of us operate.

How do you respond to claims that journalists sex up science stories?

MH: Well we do sometimes, but scientists sex-up science stories too. It’s very difficult to sex something up that isn’t without help. If we overplay something it is usually because somebody has overplayed something to us. It’s because somebody has spoken very bullishly about something or has raised a scare or a hype about it themselves, or somebody around it has or a press release has taken a particular slant on something.

Sometimes there will be cases where you will spot an angle for yourself and work that up, but by and large, in those cases, I do try and talk to scientists and see if my interpretation is realistic or not. You can only work with what people give you, we don’t make things up and I think sometimes scientists who complain that science is unnecessarily sexed up, sometimes think it is the media doing it, when actually it is very often scientists that are doing it. That’s one aspect of it.

Secondly of course, we are in the business of presenting stories in ways that are going to make our readers interested. We are always going to pick up on the aspect of a story that is most new, that is most sensational, that is potentially most relevant to people, whether through benefit or harm. It is unfortunately a bit of a fact of life that in whatever realm, whether it be science or politics or education or foreign affairs, that bad news is more news than good news. People are interested in it, it makes people sit up and say ‘wow’ rather more than if everything is fine and rosy. That is just human nature as much as anything. It’s not something that people can necessarily control or expect to control.

We’re in the business of selling papers and that’s what we have to do. Of course we want to be accurate at the same time, but of course we are always going to go for the angle on the story we think is most interesting. I don’t think that is necessarily always a bad thing. Then again, if someone really explains to me why a track I’m thinking of taking is wrong, then I will try really hard not to take that tack, and I think that applies to most science journalists.

Where a problem more often lies is when people who aren’t regular health or science or to a lesser extent environment correspondents, are writing about these issues, so politics correspondents, or general columnists or general news correspondents. For example, a lot of the really bad stuff that got written about MMR wasn’t written by science journalists, it was written by political correspondents and columnists.

If you look at the MMR coverage, with the exception of The Mail and The Sunday Telegraph which took a real campaigning tack on it, if you look at the output of science and health correspondents, you will find that it was really, really balanced and reflected the science communities opinion. If you look at other journalists, once it became a political story, that then got taken out of their hands and was harder in that sense to control. So if you are looking to advise scientists on how to go with these things, if one can arrange to talk to a science correspondent or a health correspondent then that’s usually a much better tack to take because they are much more on your side to begin with.

Have you ever misquoted anyone?

MH: It happens, or it certainly happens that you have a disputed quote or a disputed context of a quote. To be honest, it hasn’t happened to me a lot. I haven’t had many people say that I have wildly misquoted them. The one time it has happened I was definitely in the right and I had good notes to show it, and the person in question has a reputation, a huge reputation, for denying things he’s said.

But in terms of young scientists being afraid to talk to journalists because they are afraid of being misquoted or taken out of context, is that a realistic fear?

MH: It does happen. Scientists more than everybody should be aware of this; there are risks and benefits to every course of action. Talking to a journalist, you are obviously taking the risk that something may be taken out of context or may be used to illustrate a position you would rather it was not used for. That is obviously the risk.

However, you’ve got to pitch that against the risks of not talking to them, which largely means that the journalist will spin the story in any which way he wants to, you have no opportunity to influence it at all, to try to explain why this interpretation is not correct and why it would be misleading to write that. Again, if you are dealing with a science or health specialist, we are usually quite receptive to that, particularly if it is done in a timely way and you are talking to somebody quite early on in the process and they’ve returned your call quickly.

One of the big problems can be that journalists will pitch a story to a news desk, the news desk will say take this angle on it, then the news desk pitch it to the editor in that form, and suddenly the editor expects that story to be delivered in that form. If somebody then comes back to you after all that has happened and says you really can’t do it that way, then it becomes much harder to influence the process. If you have talked to the journalist early and said this is it, then the journalist can explain it to his editors early on as well and can therefore head off the potential difficulties before they arise.

I would always argue that it is better to talk to people than not talk to people. Because if you don’t talk to people you’ve got very little chance of influencing what the journalist is going to do. If you do talk to people, of course there is a small risk, but you can minimise that by first of all watching what you say, secondly by trying where possible to choose journalists to talk to.

Sometimes you can’t do that because people ring you but otherwise try to talk to a specialist whose reputation you know. Do a bit of research on what that journalist has written in the past. You can usually, if you Google people, get two or three of their stories up on the web. Even if you can’t do that just ring your press officer up. Even if you don’t know them then your press officer should, and if they don’t, they’re not a very good press officer and you should try and get another one.

The other thing I always say to people as well, to minimise the risk of being caught on the hop; if a bit of your research is coming up that might be appearing in the media, ask yourself devil’s advocates questions about it. Ask yourself what is the worst, most misleading, most inaccurate, most damaging interpretation somebody could put on this research and what’s my answer to that when somebody asks this question. Think of all the stupidest, dumbest, daftest questions and think ‘what is my answer to that question?’ If you are prepared like that, and are ready for them and can explain why your particle accelerator is not going to destroy the world, then you’re going to stand a much better chance of being able to steer the journalists in the direction you want them to go.

Why do headlines sometimes not match the article?

MH: Journalists who write the articles do not write the headlines. That unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you see it, is just the way it works. Headline writing is a very different skill to writing the whole story. It is a specialised skill that some people are very, very good at and some people aren’t. It irritates reporters as much as it irritates people who are reported on when a story is not reflected by the headline. There’s not much, I’m afraid, that one can do about it.

Sometimes, if there’s a story I know is particularly sensitive, I will check what the headline a sub has written in on it is. Sometimes I don’t have time to do that, but usually, if something is very contentious or it’s an area that might be easily misunderstood or it is a story that is going on the front, I will try to keep an eye on what the headline is and if I think it is terribly misleading I will say. There is no harm in asking a reporter if they will do that, but don’t be surprised if they say, ‘look it is just something I can’t influence’. Don’t get cross with reporters over headlines, and by all means, if a headline does really misrepresent a story, write in and complain.

Do you think young scientists should put themselves forward to the media?

MH: Yes, for the reasons I was saying earlier. First of all; if you don’t put yourself forward to the media you can’t influence what they write. And actually I think that you pretty much lose the right to complain about what they write as well if you are leaving it to people who don’t understand the work nearly as well as you to write stories from press releases and impenetrable papers in peer reviewed journals, without even being available to explain it. I think that if you are not willing to help journalists out, then you do lose the right to complain about being misrepresented.

Beyond that I think, particularly if your work is in anyway publicly funded via research council grants or charities like Wellcome, then public engagement is part of the job. I think it is a duty to be willing to communicate, and share what you are doing, and explain what you are doing and, explain what people have got for this tax payers or charitable money to the public at large. And journalists are the main interface through which one does that.

The third thing of course is, just from a selfish perspective, the more you put yourself about in the media, the more you sell your research. I think it can be very beneficial to individual profiles and ultimately to their chances of securing future research funding. So I think there are three aspects. One is you have a lot to gain just through explaining things in helping to guide coverage of a story, secondly I think there is a responsibility, and thirdly I think there is a lot to gain in terms of profile.

What would you say to young scientists who are worried they are not ‘expert’ enough for you?

MH: I can totally understand why people might feel that. First of all, the likelihood is that they are going to be contacted about things they do know about. By and large, when science journalists are seeking general comment about big political stories or major developments in science, they are going to start off with the names they know. We all have our contacts books and we’ve all got people who we know well and who are prepared to comment more broadly, and are generally more senior and have less to lose. By and large, they are always going to be the first ones we contact anyway.

In terms of young scientists, the likeliest avenue that you are going to come into contact with the media is regarding your own research, which of course you do know about and so I think you should feel qualified to talk about.

More broadly, if you really don’t feel qualified to say something, then again just say so. We will understand if someone says ‘look I just don’t know’, or ‘that’s not my area, I can’t purport to comment on it’. We always like it when people are prepared to go a bit beyond that, but I think we do understand that, particularly for people who are perhaps post-docs in their first jobs, that it can be difficult to do that. But generally I’m not going to be ringing a stem cell scientist to ask them about their opinion on nuclear power. In a sense, the whole point of talking to people is to talk to them about things that they do know about.

The other thing is, sometimes what we’re looking for is not necessarily always a direct quote, but a steer. For example there might be a paper we think is interesting, we think it might be possible to put this interpretation on it or whatever. So, we might want to send something through to somebody and say well, ‘If you want to comment on the record about this, great. But, even if you don’t want to go on the record about it, could you use your expert eye just to look over this and give me some guidance, because you know more about it than I do. Have I understood this correctly?’ Don’t be afraid to ask for more information, it’s perfectly reasonable if you are being asked to comment about a paper that is newly published in Nature that you won’t have seen yet because the journalist has it under embargo and you don’t. Ask them to send the paper through, particularly if you are in a position to read it quite quickly and come back to them quickly. The journal’s embargo policies allow us to do that; there is no problem asking for more information if you need more information.

What do you think makes a good interviewee?

MH: Brevity; the ability to simplify things while retaining accuracy. The ability to explain often difficult concepts to people that don’t have a specialist grounding in it. I always think a good test is to imagine you are explaining what you do to your Aunt at Christmas, which I’m sure most scientists have to do, unless they are in a family of Nobel prize winners. Most scientists have friends or relatives who have a vague idea of what they do but don’t really understand it properly, and sometimes you’ll be explaining to them what it is you do all day.

That’s the audience you are pitching it to; it’s an audience that is interested in what you do, you’re not trying to interest somebody who has zero interest at all, but who won’t understand the jargon you use in your daily life. They probably won’t have any prior background knowledge or will have a more limited amount than you do.

Sometimes it’s worth at the beginning of an interview just asking the reporter how much they understand of it in advance. Because, as a reporter, equally you don’t want to waste time with somebody explaining what DNA is. You might do if you are a political reporter who doesn’t know what DNA is, but it’s always worth finding out what level of expertise your interviewer has, and how much they know about it in advance; how much they know about the background.

Even then you won’t want to be using too much jargon, because remember ultimately you are not just communicating with the interviewer, you’re communicating with his or her audience at the end of the day. That applies particularly for radio and television, but even for print, because they are going to want to use your direct quotes in the piece and so they’re not going to want to have to keep striking out bits of jargon or explaining them. Those are the key things, keeping things brief, to the point and easily explanatory.

Analogies can be very useful, and I think we’d be lying if we didn’t say a willingness to set things in context. Go beyond the raw what I have done, and also be prepared to engage in what does this mean, where will this go? If it is something biomedical, when might we expect a clinical trial to start? If it’s something to do with climatology, what does this add to the general picture of global warming etc?

Ultimately what we’re trying to do as journalists, is not just to explain so-and-so has done this, but we’ve also got to explain why it matters; why our readers should be interested in the first place. Sometimes that’s obvious, but sometimes it isn’t, and it can be very frustrating if an interviewee is sticking very, very closely to the contents of their paper. It’s a different skill than writing up a paper for a journal in a sense, where the background and context are going to be taken as read.

What practical advice would you give a young scientist preparing to be interviewed?

MH: I think the key point is the one that I made earlier; ask yourself the devil’s advocate question. Beyond that it’s those same things again. Try and work out what the journalist wants. Think to yourself who does he or she work for? What kind of people read that publication or listen to that programme? Are they talking to you for direct quotes or are they more interested in finding out background about the subject?

Don’t be scared of it as well, I think that is important. Most journalists, especially science journalists, in a sense are on your side. We’re not cheerleaders for science, but neither are we against it and always looking to catch people out. We’re after interesting stories, and one of the great things about science is that it provides loads and loads and loads of them, and there is huge fascination with it. It doesn’t have to be spun to be fun. One of the nice things about it often is that straight stories can still be very, very interesting.

Sure there are journalists out there who will try and catch you out, who already have a view about a particular technology or area of science. But you are generally far better off by engaging with them and getting your views across than by not doing that. I just think that you have more to gain than you have to lose by and large.

Don’t be afraid to ring journalists up or email them if you’ve got something that you think is interesting. Whether it is your work and you’ve got a paper coming up in a journal that you think would be interesting, or you’ve done something, or you feel strongly about something, or there is a funding or structural problem that is effecting you, that’s what we love. We absolutely love it when people come to us. Sure, sometimes we’ll say I don’t think it is for us, but that’s very often where a lot of our very best stories come from.

The other great thing about that is that you’ve got something that nobody else has got. So really you should never be afraid of doing that. You could perhaps do your homework again on who you might want to approach, but that’s a really useful thing to think of.

The other thing is what to do when things go wrong; complain. Write to the journalist and the person that deals with complaints. If it’s something that isn’t maliciously wrong, phone the journalist up and point it out, you don’t necessarily need to kick up a fuss. Point out the error and explain why it is wrong. If someone is constructive in their criticism like that then journalists really appreciate it. See it as an opportunity to teach someone something. It is really helpful.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Tom Feilden

Science and Environment Correspondent for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (full biog)

Do you think it is ok for journalists from a non-science background to cover science stories?
Can you take us through a day in the life of being a journalist on the Today programme?
You have to get your stories out in the mornings. Practically how does that work? How do you find out all the information?
Do a lot of your stories have a much longer research period so you don’t get a story the night before and get it out the next day?
Do you organise the live debates?
When you are suggesting people for debates, do you choose them because they are coming from opposite spectrums? Because one concern is that the debates appear very polarised.
One of the main concerns of young scientists is misrepresentation. Do you ever get feedback from scientists saying that it’s been edited so that they are saying something that they didn’t want to say? Also what can young scientists do to make sure that this doesn’t happen?
Do you think it’s important to put young scientists forward? Would you talk to them?
How do you respond to young scientists who are worried that they are not ‘expert’ enough for you?
What do you think makes a good interviewee, thinking specifically about scientists?
What practical advice would you give to young scientists about to be interviewed for the radio?

Do you think it is ok for journalists from a non-science background to cover science stories?

TF: I’m from a non-scientific background, and although obviously it’s going to help if you do, I think the important thing really is about grasping the scientific process and how it works. Once you have grasped that you’ve made a start.

For instance, having a background in biology isn’t necessarily going to help you with nuclear physics or astronomy. You know it isn’t necessarily the case that once you know something about science, you’re going to know the ins and outs of every discipline.

I don’t think you can say that you must have a scientific background. You have to understand the principles of what a particular process is and where it starts from, but so long as you are open to that idea and you are willing to embark on a very steep learning curve then I don’t see that there is a problem. And in another sense, it is quite important not to be too immersed in the science because your audience isn’t and your responsibility is to them, rather than the scientists and journalists. That’s your duty, to communicate, so it’s very important to know, or to understand, the kind of questions that your audience might have about a particular piece of work. You might get a bit divorced from that if you were one scientist talking to another so I think it can be very valuable not to be.

I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that. Obviously it’s useful if you know what you are talking about and you do have to be of aware of going off on a story or an angle on a story that isn’t really viable. You have to watch out for that. But if you are aware of the pitfalls, I think there is no reason why a good arts student can’t be a good science journalist.

Can you take us through a day in the life of being a journalist on the Today programme?

TF: My job really divides into two roles. The BBC has a news science correspondent team that covers all the science stories for bulletins and all the different programmes, so Five Live, the Ten o’clock and Six o’clock News on TV, radio bulletins, Newsbeat - all of those programmes. But I have a much more specific role on Today, to try and do stories that get behind the headlines.

The idea is that I come in with some stories that you are not going to hear about a report being launched the following Monday. I might look at that report and say that what is really interesting about it is what you are not being told, or that the reason why this report is coming in now is far more intricate and interesting than just the fact that it is appearing. You often find the situation where a BBC correspondent will be saying “This is happening today” and then I’ll be doing a piece that says “This is why this is happening today”. It doesn’t always happen, but that is what my role is supposed to be.

When I’ve interviewed newsprint journalists they say that they come in the morning and they actually listen to the Today programme and take their stories from there! But you have to get your stories out in the mornings.

TF: Yes, we’re a preview programme so the idea is we are supposed to set the agenda for the rest of the day. I’m very happy to hear that a newspaper journalist would listen to us and think about writing something for tomorrow; that makes me feel all warm inside! It doesn’t happen that often; I think that they are being a bit generous! But yes, the idea is that we would be saying “This is going to happen later today or this is important for you to know this morning” and then through the day you’ll find it actually happens and the World at One or PM or whoever it is, picks it up and goes “This has now happened and this is what we think about it” later in the day.

Practically how does that work? How do you find out all the information?

TF: Well it varies. A lot of the time it is possible to predict that something is going to be happening next week. For instance, I am working on a story now for Saturday because it is World Laboratory Animals Day where the animal right activists are going to be having another demonstration in Oxford to mark their campaign against that laboratory opening. I am trying to do a piece saying this may or may not be a big thing later today, but it is going to be nothing like the 20,000 people that used to turn out in Trafalgar Square in the 1970’s to mark World Animal Laboratory Day. I’m looking at where the Animal Rights movement is going and whether it still commands the support it used to. Whether violence has actually undermined their broader public support and looking back at the demo or rally in Oxford in favour of medical research and asking has something changed? Has some sort of tipping point been reached where people are willing to say that we have to stand up for good medical research and there are good reasons for doing it. In a sense there is a peg for doing it on Saturday morning, but it’s a much broader piece about where we are now with the whole issue of animal research.

So would you say that a lot of your stories have a much longer research period so you don’t get a story the night before and get it out the next day?

TF: Well inevitably you do. There’ll be something that happened this afternoon and then I’ll say that we must do the implications of that tomorrow morning because it is still going to be a story. That obviously happens and everyone’s best laid plans for having a nice leisurely week working on a package for Saturday get torn asunder. That happens all the time but that is just the nature of the job really. Part of the fun of doing it is that tomorrow I could be pulled off and have to do some other story and then come and try and scramble back to my thoughtful piece for Saturday morning, late on Friday.

When you have live debates, do you organise those?

TF: Well most of the Today programme is a live presenter led programme. It means you have two people sitting in a studio, John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie, or Sarah Montague or whoever it is, and they do most of it and I tend to do bits in between. It can feel a bit like being the poly-filler filling the bits in between. But on the whole it’s a live interview led programme.

I will offer advice and say this is a really important story but there is no reason why I have to do it in a convoluted package with eight different people. You could just do it as a straightforward interview next Wednesday morning. You know there is a good story or a good reason for doing it in this way. So I offer advice and say you ought to talk to Professor So-and-so about this story. Or if you want to do something on bird flu, here is an interesting angle, why don’t you ring up so-and-so, I know that he’s very interested in that or he’s doing research on it at the moment. So I feed into the mix to support that live presenter led programme.

A lot of people that I talk to will know that they might talk to me initially about that idea and then find that they don’t get interviewed by me but they get interviewed live on the programme by John Humphrys or Jim Naughtie.

When you are suggesting people for those kind of programmes, do you choose them because they are coming from opposite spectrums? Because we get a lot of young scientists saying that when they listen to these programmes on the radio…

TF: Debates are very polarised

Yes, when in actual fact they are not really. Eighty per cent of the science community will agree with one side and only 20% will agree with the other.

TF: Well those are slightly different questions. In the first situation it is a programme. There is no getting away from the fact that even the most po-faced newspaper is still trying to engage and entertain its reader. It is valid to have a debate and put people who fundamentally disagree with each other about a particular point on the air and let them hammer it out live for the entertainment and education of the audience.

What I think you are probably getting at is a slightly different issue about fact and, for instance, the truth of the climate change issue. A problem that that kind of programming has a tendency to fall into is when it appears to challenge what is actually true or false in a particular assumption. Climate change is an obvious one there and I think that the BBC, along with a lot of other journalists, has to hold its hand up and say we’ve probably given too much air time to people who are just denying the science of climate change.

I get it in the neck a lot from people who are saying ‘why do you put these people on?’ It is not always my decision, but the thing I would highlight is that we don’t necessarily put on a sceptic about climate change in order to express this view. On the whole what we are not trying to do is to debate about whether or not the science is wrong because that seems a rather sterile debate. What we often put on is an economist or someone who is not saying that the arguments about climate change are scientifically wrong, but making an economic argument about whether we wish to pay the price involved. I think there is plenty of scope for having an economic argument that asks if we want to pay the price of mitigation or do we accept a new world.

Sometimes these distinctions get blurred, and I think certainly on the Today programme and elsewhere in the BBC, we have made the mistake of putting on an economist on that basis and then asked them “Do you think climate change is happening?” which is a stupid question. I think we are probably out of that period now and I hope that we all learnt that you don’t ask an economist, who’s a sceptic, “Do you think climate change is happening?” because he’ll say no. You should ask him about his issue which is the economics and politics.

In most interviews you are the only person there and you are asked to tell the world what your wonderful research is about and it is all very straightforward, “What does your research show us?”, “What does it add to the sum of human knowledge?” and “Where do we take it from here?” These are three basic questions for most scientific interviews. Certainly people at the junior end are only going to be asked what they’ve done in their experiment and what it proves. It’s only once you’re Steve Jones or Colin Blakemore you are going to start being asked to get into a creationist argument or a climate change argument with a leading sceptic. You are not going to get asked that when you are a first year post-grad.

One of the main concerns of young scientists that comes up again and again is misrepresentation. Do you ever get feedback from scientists saying that it’s been edited so that they are saying something that they didn’t want to say? Also what can young scientists do to make sure that this doesn’t happen?

TF: I’m a bit surprised about that. Nobody’s going to edit out the word “Not” from an interview if you say “I do not agree with x” to leave “I do agree with x”. It’s so obvious that the scientist would complain. At the very least you’d get caught. Apart from my own personal integrity, you’re never going to talk to me again if I did that. So I don’t think that’s an issue realistically. I can’t imagine a situation in which I would deliberately make it out that you thought the opposite of what you think. That’s just not going to happen. Why would I do that?

If I’m coming to a story I will have an idea of what I want you to say, I’m constructing a narrative and I’ve come to you because I think you are going to say x. Now you might say something slightly different and I might think “Well I can write around it so that I can make my point and then illustrate it with you” so there is a grey area where you might feel that you were slightly pushed into a corner where you seem to be more enthusiastic for a particular position than you were. That’s the grey area.

Now in those terms, the only advice I can give you is to know who you are talking to and whether you can trust them; build up a relationship with certain journalists you are happy to talk to. Initially you have a problem if you have never met a journalist before, but think of where they work. If they ask you the same question eighteen times and you repeatedly say one thing and then you give them a slightly more consolatory answer because you’re feeling a bit sorry for the poor beleaguered journalist who’s having trouble getting you to say what they want. You know they are going to use the answer which most fits the perspective that they want to put across. And maybe you shouldn’t have spoken to them; it is your responsibility too to make sure you think about who you are talking to and don’t say it if you don’t want to say it.

Nothing works better than saying “Hang on a moment, you seem to be trying to get me to say x, I don’t believe that”. It’s very difficult then for someone to try to imply that you do without you having recourse to write to their editor. Very rarely would you feel that you’ve been so badly misrepresented I would’ve thought. There are legal redresses for that and with the BBC or one of the big national daily papers there are ways of addressing that. Blotting a journalist’s copy-book with their editor you do have some power.

Do you think it’s important to put young scientists forward? Would you talk to them?

TF: Yes, absolutely. As I say, certainly very early in your career the most that is going to happen is that you’re going to be asked to explain in words of one syllable what it is you’ve actually done that’s so clever. That will be the timbre of the piece and everyone will grin and smile and go “Wow that is really interesting”. It is only later when you are more experienced and more responsible and further up the chain that you are going to be asked questions about policy or questions that have difficult political connotations. It is very rare that a young researcher is going to be asked anything other than to recount what they’ve done in a way the audience can understand. In the early years it should be a breeze talking to me, it should be fun.

How do you respond to young scientists who are worried that they are not ‘expert’ enough for you, people who are supervisors?

TF: Well stick to what you know. If you don’t think you know or if a journalist says “What do you think of your company or your research institution’s policy on this or the way which research is going?”, don’t answer. Say “That’s not for me you’ll have to ask the professor. What I’ve done is this piece of research…” If you are not happy to answer a question don’t answer it. Talk about your work and what you want to talk about and say “I’m sorry that’s not for me” if need be.

What do you think makes a good interviewee, thinking specifically about scientists?

TF: Well you have to describe quite a complicated issue in a way that people are going to be able to get. You’re going to have to think about what is the really crucial thing or really interesting part of it. Do a bit of homework, do sit down and think ‘What do I want to say here?’ What are the things that are fun and interesting or original or novel or useful about whatever it is that I’ve done. Then you can think about ways of describing it. If you can get some nice metaphors in there that always helps.

Think of past-masters at it. Someone like Steve Jones will answer a question and he won’t say ‘yes’, ‘no’ or go into an elaborate description of the genetics of what he’s done; he’ll tell you a little story. Whatever it is, engage people. To get it your work on air it is your responsibility to be able to communicate it.

There is no set formula but you have to think about how you tell your granny the clever thing you’ve done at work today. You’d find a form of language that she would find amusing or exciting or interesting and that sums it up without getting bogged down in the technical detail.

Obviously you are running a risk - if you leave out the technical detail you are not telling the whole truth and you have to be careful not to mislead with your verbose florid language, particularly to exaggerate your claims in that way - but there are ways of doing it. The best communicators can find a way to get the point across and paint a mental picture without telling an untruth or over-egging their research.

Finally, what practical advice would you give to young scientists about to be interviewed for the radio?

TF: Sit down and think about what it is specifically that you want to say. Think about what it is that they are going to want and before you go on you’ll have a discussion as they’ll want to prime their presenter. In that conversation, in addition to telling them what you are going to say, you should find out as much about where the interviewer is coming from. That is your chance to find out whether there is a hidden agenda, whether they are trying to get you to say something that you don’t necessarily agree with. It is your chance to find out if they are going to come on and say “You say you are now able to cure cancer” or “We don’t need to take the MMR jab” etc.

You will go through it with the producer beforehand so find out where they are coming from and then sit down and think ‘How am I going to communicate that?’ Write down three key points that you are going to make or three examples that you are going to give and then let it go from there. It is a bit of a spontaneous and rolling thing, a live radio interview; go with the flow.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Anna Fazackerley

Higher education correspondent for the Times Higher Education Supplement, formerly the science correspondent (full biog)

Do you feel qualified to write stories that feature science when you are not a scientist?
Do you get much time to check your stories?
How do you respond to claims that journalists ‘sex up’ science stories?
Do you misquote people?
Why do the headlines sometimes not match the article?
Do you think it is important for young scientists to put themselves forward to talk to the media?
How do you respond to young scientists who are worried that they are not ‘expert’ enough for your interview?
What makes a good interviewee, thinking specifically about scientists?
What practical advice would you give to young scientists who are going to be interviewed by a journalist?
What is the difference in writing for a weekly and writing for a daily?

Do you feel qualified to write stories that feature science when you are not a scientist?

AF: On one level no, and I get nervous when I am confronted about it. However, most of our readers are not scientists, and it is important for them to understand what science is talking about. If I don’t have a science degree I am less likely to use jargon than other writers.

Do you get much time to check your stories?

AF: No, not usually. I am usually late for my deadline and getting hassle from my news editor. I read through for grammar and spelling mistakes, but nothing else. When the subs team get it, they may change something without my knowing. But this doesn’t usually change the meaning of what I have said.

How do you respond to claims that journalists ‘sex up’ science stories?

AF: I think it is splendid that journalists ‘sex up’ science stories and it is naive of scientists to think they shouldn’t. All stories should be sexy. An attractive, sexy line doesn’t make it untrue. That phrase has too bad a name.

Do you misquote people?

AF: No, I have never misquoted anyone and I will never misquote anyone. I think that fear points to a bit of confusion. Probably what happens is that people are selectively quoted, which I do in every article that I write, and will continue to do in every article I write.

Sometimes you talk to people and they talk to you for an hour and say lots of interesting things. It is your job as a journalist to pick out the bits that are interesting and the bits that are most relevant to the story you are writing. Sometimes people are really offended that you haven’t simply provided a transcript of everything that was said. Obviously that would fill up the whole paper, so I think it is a little bit arrogant to assume that everything you say is worth quoting.

The important thing a journalist looks for is a soundbite. That might be something that young scientists would like to think about. Think about a sentence that a journalist is likely to quote and it is pretty likely to go in. You really notice that with scientists that are experienced in talking to the media, they quite often talk in soundbites. Then I think they are not surprised by what they see written.

Why do the headlines sometimes not match the article?

AF: Because journalists don’t write headlines, and if you ask a journalist whether this will ever change they will tell you it won’t. I’m absolutely rubbish at writing headlines, so if I wrote my own headlines no one would ever read them.

Headlines quite often over-hype things, and they just take one thing and don’t sum up a story. But you have to remember that they’re the hook that grabs the reader and without the headline people probably wouldn’t bother reading about the research. So don’t be too petty about it. You might not like the headline, but if someone stops and thinks ‘Wow, that looks interesting’ and then reads what you’ve got to say, it’s better than them turning over the page and ignoring you completely.

Do you think it is important for young scientists to put themselves forward to talk to the media?

AF: Completely. I am in desperate need of new young scientists all the time. There are too many bearded men in their sixties wanting to talk about science. It is very hard to find women who want to talk about science and it is very hard to find young people who want to talk about science.

Quite often young people are the ones who have a new fresh interesting perspective on things, and they are more likely to talk in informal, interesting language. They’re doing interesting research that people want to hear about and their picture will look nice in the paper.

How do you respond to young scientists who are worried that they are not ‘expert’ enough for your interview?

AF: If it’s a national issue, for example nuclear power, and you do feel really uncomfortable and you don’t think you know enough, then you don’t have to do it. So feel that you can say no. You can choose who you talk to. But I do feel that if you make it clear that you are giving a personal viewpoint it is perfectly safe. As long as you take time to think about what you say.

If it is a controversial issue, and that is why you are worrying, then say that you would like to take a few minutes to have a think. You can even have a chat with your head of department and say ‘I want to make these points, what do you think?’ But I don’t think you have to be an expert. You will always be more of an expert than the reader in this particular area so you don’t have to know absolutely everything. You are just giving a bit more of an insight to the person reading the article and you’ll know more than they’ll ever know I’m sure.

What makes a good interviewee, thinking specifically about scientists?

AF: A good interviewee is sparky, uses colourful language, and explains things in a simple fashion. If you work in a complicated area of science it is really splendid if you can use analogies from the outside world. These are the sort of things that will always make it into a quote. They really bring things to life and make everything feel much more accessible.

If you get in touch with somebody for an interview, you can’t wait a week. I sometimes get people calling me back saying to me ‘About that article you called me about two weeks ago…’ and by this point we are two issues on with the paper and it’s far too late. I’ve already called Mr Smith who comments in every article I write because he always gets back to me quickly. That’s really, really important.

What practical advice would you give to young scientists who are going to be interviewed by a journalist?

I think that scientists quite often haven’t worked out that they are allowed to have some control over the process. That doesn’t mean that journalists will give you a copy to check, that’s certainly something I would never do. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t ask sensible questions like, ‘What story are you writing?’ Or after the interview, ‘Was there anything in particular you thought might make a good story? What angle might you go on? What are you likely to quote me on?’ I will always read back quotes to people.

Also if you need to have a bit of time to think about it, you can’t take a day, you can’t even take half a day, but you can take 10 minutes and say you need to go to the loo and think about it. That’s the time that you can think about what you want to say and maybe even come up with a few soundbites to go with it.

If I was asked not to use a quote from an interview after I had read it back to someone after the interview, I wouldn’t use it. If you are talking to a specialist science journalist, they have a vested interest in not annoying you because they need to stay friendly with the science community. If a scientist you have interviewed starts telling people you are untrustworthy, then they won’t talk to you and their colleagues won’t talk to you. Before you know it your reputation is blown and you can’t get anymore stories. So it is a very big deal. It really matters to me that I have the academic community onside so I play it very straight. So if you say to me I don’t want you to use that quote, then I would negotiate.

What is the difference in writing for a weekly and writing for a daily?

AF: In an ideal world I should have lots proof time. I should be able to go back to the scientists and chat to them about a lot of different things. The reality is that I do everything at the last minute. I spend my week at meetings and trying to find something to write about and then write all of my stories at the last minute with the news desk on my case.

The big difference for a weekly is that everything needs to be new. I can’t write about press releases; it all has to be news things the nationals haven’t written about. I do more talking to people than reading journals; talking about what they are working on and what’s coming up. That’s what makes my contacts so important.

Young scientists should step up. I want them but it also helps their careers. I have spoken to a lot of vice-chancellors who love academics that talk to the media, they think it is really important for their university to get profile. I know it takes you away from the whole publishing thing that you are completely obsessed with at the beginning of your career, but it can help your career in other ways. Besides I think it is important to be a good role model.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Dr Debbie Wake

Published medical doctor, scientific researcher and trained media presenter. She has recently completed a PhD looking at the role of steroid hormones in obesity and diabetes (full biog)

What experience have you got talking to the media?
Would you say the amount of contacts you get from the media has increased since your first initial contacts?
Do you think you are known as a bit of a science media expert?
Have you ever had any particularly bad or particularly good experiences?
If you could, what advice would you give to your former self?
If you’ve got an interview with a journalist how do you prepare for it?
How do you deal with questions that aren’t about your area of research?
Are you ever asked to speculate?
What can scientists do to improve their working relationship with the media?

What experience have you got talking to the media?

DW: Initially my contact with the media was as a specialist talking about obesity related stories. My PhD was about obesity, diabetes and heart disease so they must have got my contact through the university and initially occasionally phoned me up if there was an obesity story that they wanted a specialist comment on.

Subsequent to that, there has been some specific stories relating to my own research which partly came about when I was looking for volunteers for my own research and I spoke to a few people in the media about that. From that there were a few stories that came out about the research we were doing.

More recently because I have started up this regular pod cast, that has had quite a bit of media attention and media publicity. So the stuff that I’ve been doing has been in relation to that; people writing stories about the pod cast or I’ve written my own pieces as well that the papers have asked me to write about the pod cast. Lastly, just in the last week I’ve started writing my own column for The Scotsman. So it’s gone through different levels of things that I’ve done relating to the media.

I didn’t realise you had a column in The Scotsman.

DW: As I say, I just started. It came about with the ‘Dr Pod’ pod cast we’re doing. They asked me to write one piece for that and I did a massive almost-full page spread about the pod cast and after that they asked me if I wanted to start writing a column for them. So I’ve just started doing that. That’s been great.

So would you say the amount of contacts you get from the media has increased since your first initial contacts?

DW: Yes, definitely. It started off just very ad hoc and the occasional contact for an obesity story when they just wanted a comment for an article they were writing. I guess it has been through that as well as just getting to know a few people and using it a bit for my own research. But things have increased.

Do you think you are known as a bit of a science media expert?

DW: Yes, I suppose, it’s just through local contacts and things. Newspapers will tend to build up a list of people they know and who are happy to speak to them so just through that things have increased.

So have you ever had any particularly bad or particularly good experiences? Obviously ending up with a column is particularly good!

DW: Yes, it’s funny because I think as time has gone on and probably as my experience has increased and my confidence in speaking to the media has increased then my experiences have been more positive.

The worst experiences were early on when you would get a phone call out of the blue. I didn’t have much experience and I was probably quite nervous and tended to speak before thinking. I felt a bit rushed into things and therefore probably didn’t give the best answers and that maybe reflects in the stuff. But as time has gone on I think it is just experience and having confidence and taking your time when you are talking to the media. Those bad early experiences were possibly as much my fault from being just inexperienced and rushed and lately it has been more of a two way dialogue that I’ve had with the media and that has worked a lot better.

So if you could go back to your former self and give her some advice, what would it be?

DW: I think a lot of things. First of all to take your time, to think about what you are being asked, not to feel rushed into giving an answer and speak on a one-to-one level. I think a lot of the time when you are phoned up by somebody, you feel the need to give the answer there and then and to know everything. In fact if you speak to people on a one-to-one just as another person and be as open as you can, take your time and think about things, then if you want time to look into something you can phone them back 15 minutes later once you have had the time to look something up or think about it then that’s fine. At the end of the day it will produce a much better piece and something you’ll be happier with and you won’t feel misquoted and what will be reflected will be much more of what you want to say.

If you’ve got an interview with a journalist how do you prepare for it?

DW: A lot of the time you’ll get a call out of the blue and you often don’t necessarily get a chance to prepare for it. Certainly in the early days when I was getting phoned up about obesity articles they would phone up and say to you there’s this story, this is what it’s about and give us your comments on it, and you feel like you have to comment there and then. So often you don’t have that much time to prepare for it in which case you just have to try and get as much information back from the journalist about the story. If you want in that situation to go away and think about it and come back, then say that to them, but often there is the whole pressure of time. It’s something that they’ve got to get done in the next couple of hours and they want a comment there and then. But if you do have time to prepare for it obviously that’s different.

If it’s something that you are given a bit of warning about, which usually doesn’t happen, then you’ll look into it as much as you can, try and think about what you are going to say and write yourself a list of questions. Try and think about the jargon that you might be talking about and think in advance a bit about how you are going to simplify that. Think quite clearly about what message you’re wanting to get across. Think about whom your audience is, the information you want to impart and what the underlying message is because 9 times out of 10 journalists phone you for a slant on a story that they want you to take. They’ll phone up almost expecting you and wanting you to fill in the gaps in their story of any particular slant. It can be talking for or it can be talking against an argument. They’ll phone up very much with their own agendas.

I think you’ve got to be clear in your head what your agenda is going to be. If it’s talking about your own research then just be very clear about what it is you want said about it and what you think the public will find interesting.

How do you deal with questions that aren’t about your area of research?

DW: You’ve just got to be honest. I think when they are inexperienced, people just try and keep talking and don’t admit the limits of their knowledge. Everybody does have limits to their knowledge and if it is something that’s blatantly not in your area of research you’ve got to be honest and just say that it is not in you remit. Don’t make things up because there is nothing worse than being quoted out of your area and getting something wrong. I think it is important to just stick to what you know.

Are you ever asked to speculate?

DW: Yes, in some incidences. More often than not you are asked to give your opinion on something rather than to speculate. I think that’s fine; people are often scared to give their opinion but if they have knowledge in a certain area then they should be able to give a reasonable opinion on that. Particularly for young scientists who often feel their opinion isn’t valued, but their opinion is as important and as good as anybody else’s opinion. But again if you are speculating on something that you are not 100 percent sure about then you just shouldn’t do it. Obviously if it’s something within your area and you are happy to speculate then that’s fine but know your limits, that’s very important.

Finally, what can scientists do to improve their working relationship with the media?

DW: The main thing is not seeing them as the enemy. I’ve learnt that as time has gone on, often there just seems to be this negative relationship between the two and I don’t think there needs to be. I think scientists can get a lot of benefit from the media and the media can get a lot of benefit from scientists and everybody is working towards the same means at the end of the day, passing important and interesting science health stories out to the public.

Don’t see them as the enemy but use them to help your own research. See it as a two-way conversation rather than one-way and be as open and honest as you can. If you have got an interesting research story don’t wait for people to come to you, go to them. Speak to them and find out who the local health correspondents are, get to be known by them and don’t be afraid to comment on health stories and things that have come out.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Dr Robin Lovell-Badge

Head of Developmental Genetics at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London (full biog)

What experience have you got talking to the media? How did you first get started?
What have you done since then? Because now you’re asked for comment, how did that come about?
You’re asked to comment on a lot of people’s stories - have you ever gone to the media with a story?
If you see something that’s wrong you can write to a journalist and say I can explain this to you because actually you’ve explained it wrong, or write a letter. Have you done these things as well?
Looking back to when you first started now, if there was one piece of advice you could give your uninitiated self, what would it be?
How do you prepare for an interview?
How do you communicate what can be quite abstract ideas to a lay audience, or to a journalist who perhaps isn’t a scientist who has to then communicate them to a lay audience?
How do you deal with what can be quite emotive arguments from one side when you’re talking in quite scientific, what can seem quite impersonal language, without looking heartless?
Do you think it’s important to actually state where you stand rather than trying to avoid the question? That it’s important to say “I have an ethical point here” as well?
How far are you prepared to speculate, how do you do that without going too far?
What do you think scientists can do to improve their working relationship with the media?

What experience have you got talking to the media? How did you first get started?

RL: My lab was working on the subject of sex determination - this was in the late eighties. It was an interesting scientific story to try and find the gene on the Y chromosome that determines maleness. And there was a big transatlantic race to try and find this gene. A group in the US at MIT found a gene, which they claimed to be the right one, but it wasn’t. My lab was working on it as was a collaborator’s lab, Peter Goodfellow, he’s a human geneticist and I’m a mouse geneticist. Initially Peter Goodfellow gave up, thinking the group in the States were correct, but our evidence suggested they weren’t, and (to cut a long story short) we were able to show that they weren’t correct and to find the real gene.

There was a lot of anticipation about this, the subject was an interesting one in any case. People have always wanted to know what triggers maleness, and then because of this obvious race to find the gene, where it looked like we had lost and then in fact, we’d won, this was going to be a popular story.

So when the first paper was published in Nature in 1990, Nature decided they should hold a press conference on it as they thought it was going to be a big story. That was really my first big encounter with the media, at this press conference. I had a little bit of training for it, just an hour’s chat with the then MIT’s press officer. So this was a pretty scary thing to do. But it went very well, everyone was interested, and I can’t remember there being on that occasion any bad stories, it was all positive, about how we looked like we’d found the right gene.

We hadn’t quite proven it was the gene though we were pretty sure it was, but it needed some more work to really show that it was the gene. And this we did by making transgenic mice, so we were able to take the mouse gene, called SrY, by itself and inject it into fertilised mouse eggs, to make transgenic mice. A proportion of the chromosomally-female mice that had taken up this SrY transgene turned into males, so that was the proof that this was the only gene on the Y chromosome that you needed to trigger male development. This was also published in Nature.

We had thought that it would be scientifically interesting, but we thought that what we’d already done a year before with the press conference was really announcing the gene and we didn’t think it would be that big a story, but it turned out to be even bigger in terms of media interest.

For a period of about a month we had non-stop media attention. On the day of publication & preceding it we did a few things such as an interview for BBC World Service that were linked to the paper coming out, but what really tipped the balance was The Independent, which had the top half of the front page with a picture of one of our sex-reversed mice and the story, and this was certainly at the time remarkable to have a science story like this featured so prominently in a national newspaper. So the rest of the media picked up on that and just ran with it.

So during that time you did radio interviews, television…?

RL: Yes, radio, television, lots of everything, and not just within the UK but we had enquiries from all over the world - one South Korean television company came and did a thing in the lab.

What have you done since then? Because now you’re asked for comment, how did that come about?

RL: Well, that was a big story about our own work, and it was almost all positive. There was however one negative story. A feature writer for the London Evening Standard wrote a piece which essentially likened me to Dr Mengele, who’s the Nazi who did experiments on prisoners; “Of Mice and Mengele” by Mary Kenny. It was really uncalled for; it was a device to get readers’ attention to the story but it was something that should not have been said.

Luckily I didn’t have to defend myself, because Louis Wolpert got very cross about this. Louis Wolpert is a well-known developmental biologist who worked for a long time at University College, London. He’s quietened down now because he’s getting older but he was probably the most common spokesperson for biological sciences at that time and he still does a lot of science communication stuff but much more low-key; writing books more than appearing on TV or radio. He got very upset about this and rang up the editor of the Evening Standard and the next day there was an apology from the editor. So that was nice.

There were some silly stories but I think that was the only bad one. My collaborator Peter Goodfellow was working on what was then the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and some newspapers were saying things like “cancer cure” about finding this gene, which was silly.

But you asked how I then got into other things - well, having gained a lot of experience very quickly in those two instances, I was then used on occasions to comment on other people’s work to do with genetics or sex-determination, transgenics, genetic manipulations, sporadically. I suspect it was usually the MRC press office who would put me in touch with the person who made the enquiry, to have someone to comment on the story. Or people like Louis Wolpert, who, if they couldn’t do something, suggested me. I did do a 2-day training course on the media, which was at our institute, sponsored by the MRC, and that was quite useful, and then they started using me for various things, not necessarily a huge amount.

Then when I got to be used a lot was partly when the Dolly cloning story really hit the headlines, and I think again it was in part because people like Louis Wolpert and Steve Jones were not around on that particular day. The story broke on the Sunday and on the Monday there was a lot of media attention, so I was used a lot. I was on Newsnight with Paxman talking about that. I guess I did okay at that and so I was then used quite a lot for all sorts of different cloning stories. I’d done a little bit before but that was really my big exposure to talking about other people’s research.

You’re asked to comment on a lot of people’s stories - have you ever gone to the media with a story?

RL: Well I suppose the very first one was Nature saying we should have a press conference and we said yes, so there was that one. Subsequently, yes, I guess we have in a number of ways. I’ve suggested stories to the media, and of course I’m doing research and the MRC encourages us to put out a press release, and sometimes those have been picked up a little bit. So I have, but I’m not aggressive about it. I’ve interacted quite a lot with the Science Media Centre, so I’ve suggested some things to them which they’ve picked up, or they’ve distributed ideas. And I now know lots of the science journalists and again I’ve suggested stories for them on occasions, and sometimes they’ve been picked up and sometimes they haven’t.

One of the things with this guide is that we want to show that there are a number of different ways you can go to the media, you don’t have to be someone who’s quoted in an article - if you see something that’s wrong you can write to a journalist and say I can explain this to you because actually you’ve explained it wrong, or write a letter. Have you done all of these things as well? Or just written a letter in response that gets printed on the letters page?

RL: I have written a few things like that. One story I did which was to do with the future of our Institute - there was a proposal by the Medical Research Council to relocate our institute to Cambridge, but only at about half its size. People at the Institute weren’t at all happy about this, and generally the science community thought it was stupid. I wrote a piece that went in The Guardian Science Life supplement. I’d had a conversation with Tim Radford who suggested I do this, he was happy for me to send something in, so that was quite a long piece that went in. I was dealing with not an actual science issue but a science policy issue. And it was well received by some people but I got in deep trouble from others!

I think I’ve been asked to write things more than written in, but I’ve written in about cloning stories or the Science and Technology Select Committee (of the House of Commons) - they’ve put out a report and I’ve been asked to comment on that, so I’ve done things a little bit more proactive but also responsive on both of those. I would actually like to do more proactive stuff, just write about particular aspects of science, I just haven’t done it because I haven’t had time.

There’s one other story I should say, which is why I’m particularly well known probably amongst the science journalists. I was used by several organisations to provide information to members of both Houses of Parliament in the run-up to the votes about changing the Human Fertility and Embryo Act to accommodate work with embryonic stem cells and cloning. So that was a big campaign and that’s the other way you can get involved as a scientist, is in a big issue like that.

I have to say you have to be very careful about doing this as it can be very time-consuming, and it was, this one. It started off with organisations, The Royal Society, the MRC, the Wellcome Trust, and some of the disease charities. They were getting requests for information, so it was decided to do it in a more proactive way, and we organised various talks that took place in the Houses of Parliament, so I participated in some of those debates and things. But then I also became a contact for all sorts of people, so I was having journalists emailing me and calling me up, members of both Houses of Parliament calling me up or emailing me, umpteen times a day for months and months.

So for me it was a fascinating experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but my lab probably suffered a little bit so my research probably suffered at that time because my attention was devoted not to that. So a word of caution, just be careful of doing that - I would recommend it, it’s a fun thing to do, but you just have to be aware that the day job might suffer!

Looking back to when you first started now, if there was one piece of advice you could give your uninitiated self, what would it be?

RL: If you’re asked to comment either on your own or someone else’s research, or give an interview, you’re in charge - don’t let the interviewer take control. You have to be in charge, you say what you want to say. Go in there prepared depending on how long you have. You should always ask how long have I got - is it a one minute slot, a three minute slot, a ten minute chat - and according to the length of time you can get across a certain number of points, rarely more than three. Go prepared with those three most important things you want to say, and try to make sure you say them, so don’t let the interviewer distract you into a topic which you don’t want to talk about.

How do you prepare for an interview?

RL: Well, if it’s my subject then of course I know about it in a lot of detail - if it’s someone else’s work that you’re asked to comment on, make sure you know what you’re talking about, because it often happens that people do give interviews and they don’t actually know what they’re talking about sufficiently. If you’re asked a question you don’t know the answer to, don’t make one up because you’ll be caught out. You just be honest and say “I’m sorry, I don’t know the detail about that”.

Certainly if it’s to do with someone else’s work that’s been published I will always ask for a copy of the paper or at least as many details as possible about the work so that I know where the interviewer might be coming from, what sort of questions they might ask, just so you can actually explain the science properly. If you don’t know what it is you can’t explain it.

Then I will try and think of the most important points of the work, whether it’s your own or someone else’s - what’s the critical thing that you should try and get across? That’s the two or three points, the take-home-message from the story that you really want to get across. And if at all possible it’s nice to have some soundbites, some nice neat phrases that are prepared. I’m not very good at doing that in advance, I have to say, I tend to think on my feet a little bit, so I don’t necessarily know what’s going to come out of my mouth! But it’s useful to think about things like that.

If it’s going to be a TV interview, you need to look okay. I don’t go out of my way to dress up but there’s several rules like don’t wear a white shirt. It’s useful to be aware of those simple rules. Try and appear calm even if you’re not - I get very nervous actually, but I try to appear calm.

How do you communicate what can be quite abstract ideas to a lay audience, or to a journalist who perhaps isn’t a scientist who has to then communicate them to a lay audience?

RL: As much as possible avoid jargon - don’t use difficult terms, use plain English. Don’t use long convoluted sentences, don’t say “um” and “er” too much, which is what I’m doing at the moment! Don’t speak too fast. Experience in the end helps a lot to know the sorts of things you can get away saying and those things you can’t. But really avoiding terms, or if you use a scientific term then define it in non-scientific words. Use metaphors, use colourful ways of describing something in common terms which are describing a scientific process, so parallels or metaphors, they can help.

You’ve done a lot of stuff on stem cells or cloning which seem to be quite controversial issues. We’ve developed all these questions with our young scientists, and one of the questions that came up was: you have a lot of people who are against stem cell research and their arguments can be quite emotive, “these are babies,” so how do you deal with what can be quite emotive arguments from one side when you’re talking in quite scientific, what can seem quite impersonal language, without looking heartless?

RL: One lesson to always think of is that you’re never going to be able to persuade 100% of your audience. Certainly in those situations there’s always going to be the people who are coming from an angle based on a fundamental belief and you’re not going to change that however hard you try. So don’t try to win over everyone, but you can try to win over the majority of people although you’re a scientist and you’re basically trying to convey scientific principles.

One Louis Wolpert, “Wolpertian” viewpoint, is that basic science is neutral, there’s no ethical value to it, it’s just information, it’s how you use that information that can have a value so you can use any bit of information for good or bad. You can use fire to cook food, you can use fire to burn people at the stake. Anything can be used for good or bad, it’s how you apply it. So you can argue that basic science is neutral.

You can also argue look at the good things. So, in terms of making embryonic stem cells, yes you have to destroy an early embryo, you can point out scientific facts like: remember that roughly three quarters of fertilised eggs fail to make it beyond implantation anyway. So you’re talking about using a few embryos in the context of a huge number that are going to be lost anyway, and that no-one grieves about those embryos. You can use scientific facts to help support an argument why this is okay to do it.

But you have to say also I think that it is ethically bad not to do this research, because this research we hope is going to lead to cures and certainly better quality of life for many people. So you balance it up with arguments like that.

Do you think it’s important to actually state where you stand rather than trying to avoid the question? That it’s important to say “I have an ethical point here…” as well?

RL: Yes, I think that’s important; not just to give in and say, “I don’t care about ethics, it’s not my subject.” I think you have to be prepared to defend your science, or the topic you’re talking about, you have to be able to. It’s frustrating in many of these debates, meaning an organised debate or an interview on TV or wherever where they have you against, say, a pro-life person. Because there’s always a risk of giving the viewer or listener a distorted view. It’s not 50% of people think one way and 50% of people think another; the pro-life group are really a minority. So it’s actually more like one to a thousand, but that doesn’t come across because of this. It can be frustrating at times, this strong tendency of the media to make it appear that there is a debate between two sides, so they will always want the negative as well as the positive, whereas in fact that doesn’t actually reflect reality in terms of the proportions who are for and against.

It’s not just the pro-life stuff I get involved in, it’s animal activists as well - I do animal research, I’ve never hidden it, I talk about it, I’m lucky I’ve never had anyone attack me for it, ever, and that’s because there are so few people out there who are against animal research.

You do a lot of comment so you must speculate on what your findings mean - how far are you prepared to go, how do you do that without going too far?

RL: I have to say it’s those questions I don’t like. I will often say that I don’t like answering those questions because in some ways they are meaningless, because we don’t know, we can’t predict the future, we don’t know how things are going to go. If we didn’t do this piece of research or if Dr X hadn’t done this piece of research, you couldn’t even ask the question, there would be no advance at all. So the research is important, and we hope it’s going to lead to cures, but it’s very hard to speculate when it will lead to a cure.

I have said things like “I think in five years we might start to see some clinical experiments, people might start thinking about testing something in patients. Then over the next five years or so you may start to see the beginnings of clinical trials, and then between ten and fifteen years you might see more exhaustive clinical trials and perhaps techniques being introduced into the clinic.” But I’ll say that not necessarily believing it but because they’re forcing you to say something.

I shouldn’t admit to this really but if you say something is going to be 15-20 years into the future before anything starts to happen, then they’re not going to be interested, they’ll say that’s way too far away, we don’t care about that. So it’s important to have the story publicised if it’s a nice piece of science so you don’t want them to dismiss it because it’s too far in the future. If you say it’s going to be in the clinic in five years, that’s completely unrealistic. By making it sound progressive I think it comes across better. It’s not going to be immediate, it’s not going to benefit people suffering from these diseases now, but it’ll benefit their children.

If you make comparisons with what happens to pharmaceutical drug development; if someone finds a compound that they think might be useful, they’re never going to say that within five years this will be in people, because they know they have to go through all these hoops, regulatory hoops and clinical trials before it goes on the market, and quite often that takes fifteen years. So why should it take any less for something like stem-cell treatment? So it’s a reasonable sort of thing to say but it’s a little artificial always, and I’ll say that, because it’s impossible to guess when something will be useful in the clinic. It may never be, but the information we learn along the way might tell us how to do it properly.

Finally, what do you think scientists can do to improve their working relationship with the media?

RL: I think it’s important for scientists to understand where the media are coming from. People are scared often of getting misrepresented in the media, or they’ll read something they know about, and it’s not reported correctly, there are mistakes in it. So they say, “I don’t want to talk to the media because they’re going to misrepresent my science, misquote me, mistreat me.” Well of course that happens because it happens in any field, so it’s not specific to science, it happens in politics, it happens wherever.

But if you understand journalists, understand what they’re trying to do and where they’re coming from, then you’re going to be less frightened of them and actually more able to answer the questions in the way that they want you to answer anyway.

So I would advise people to get to know journalists. Do a media course where often you will get professional journalists coming along teaching on the course. I think that’s the best way - understand the journalist and where he’s coming from.

We all just need to get along!

RL: We do - it’s obvious. This two-day media course I did, which was taught by the professional journalist, they got us doing various things. We had to pretend to be newspaper journalists at a press conference, so we had to interview this scientist, and write a column for the newspaper. And it’s amazing how badly we did, it’s not easy to do this. We didn’t ask his nationality. We were told that Dr X was flying in from Germany, he was going to be at Heathrow for half an hour where we could do this press conference, so of course we all assumed he was German, but he wasn’t. Things like that, we’d missed all sorts of obvious questions.

The other thing is people think that the serious newspapers, the broadsheets, The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph - they’re the ones to go for because the writing is good writing. Actually it’s much harder probably to write for The Sun, The Mirror and The Mail - so you shouldn’t shy away from talking to journalists whichever newspaper they’re from, and help them, because they need to put things in terms that everyone can understand. They need more help than the science journalists working for The Telegraph etc.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Emma King

In her final year of a cosmology PhD at the University of Nottingham (full biog)

Can you describe your first experiences with the media?

EK: I recall a journalist calling me. I’d never had any previous contact with journalists and, to start with, I just talked to them like they were a friend or an interested member of the public. It wasn’t until they started repeating things back to me in terms of what they wanted to print that I realised I should have started out on a different track!

I had attempted to explain my project in fairly vague and general terms and ended up with them saying things like “can we say you’ve discovered anti-gravity?”, at which I was fairly horrified! I then had to backtrack lots, to try and figure out better ways of putting things, but it seemed that by that point they’d already decided how to make an exciting story out of it and weren’t too pleased by me saying “please don’t print that, it’s not true”. It was rather scary to think that the things I’d been saying without giving too much thought to them could end up in print, and that, worse still, they might have been horribly mistranslated first.

They were obviously trying to get a nice exciting headline out of what I’d done, but the bit of the project that I won the prize for was just a reasonably clever bit of mathematics which was hard to explain, particularly in terms of catchy headlines. They were trying to take my explanation of the wider subject area and make it sound like it was my work.

These days I would probably ask if I could think about it and call them back 20 mins later when I had come up with some good stuff to say that was both accurate and (relatively) catchy, but at the time it really put me off speaking to journalists at all. And I never did see the final article - I’m not even sure if they ran the story in the end.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright

Post-doctoral researcher and science communication officer for the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and the astronomy researcher for the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (full biog)

What experience do you have when talking to the media?
How have things progressed in terms of how often you’re contacted?
Have you had any particularly bad or particularly good media experiences?
Do you think the reason that you’ve always had quite good experiences is directly because of this BA fellowship?
What’s the one thing that you know now that had you known in the beginning, would have been really, really helpful?
Have you ever contacted the media with a story?
How do you prepare for an interview?
How do you communicate what can be quite abstract ideas to a journalist writing for a lay audience?
When you’re talking to journalists, do they ever ask you to speculate? Do you respond to that or do you just not do that at all?
What can scientists do to improve their relationship with the media?

What experience do you have when talking to the media?

LJW: I’ve got varied experience, actually. I started as a student through the outreach activities and the science communication work that I was doing as a PhD student. I was contacted by the media because I’m an astronomer. It’s quite a public-friendly topic and something people are generally very interested in. So I began very briefly being contacted by the media to talk about what I was doing. The first instance was a subject relating to my PhD. I was looking at working out how our own galaxy, the Milky Way, formed from the Big Bang and an animation that I produced interested the media and consequently I had a number of interviews relating to that.

How has that progressed in terms of how often you’re contacted? Obviously it’s bloomed since then, don’t you work as an adviser now at Greenwich Observatory?

LJW: Yes that’s right. I’m providing content advice to the new development at the Royal Observatory. It’s who you know as much as what you know, and consequently, if you become a media-friendly scientist, then they will contact you again, even if it’s a subject outside of your field. One of the advantages I had was I worked as a BA media fellow with the Financial Times. I actually saw the other side of things and that made me much more aware of what one needed to do in order to facilitate and help the media as much as possible.

Have you had any particularly bad or particularly good media experiences?

LJW: On the whole I would say my experiences with the media were good but one has to be familiar with the environment that they’re working with and the sort of constraints that they’re working under as well. I did have one bad experience with a digital radio program, Radio 1 Extra. Astronomers tend to shy away from the subject of Astronomy versus Astrology but I decided to bite the bullet, shall we say, and the interviewer basically got it wrong; from getting my name wrong to getting everything else wrong. That was one of the worst experiences but it wasn’t in a particularly derogatory or bad way, it’s just that the research hadn’t been done and it was live.

Do you think the reason that you’ve always had quite good experiences is directly because of this BA fellowship? So you know that they only have about five hours to get a story in etc.?

LJW: Exactly. I think my usefulness to the media has increased hugely since I did the fellowship. I was doing radio interviews and newspaper interviews before I took the fellowship, but just because I enjoy talking to people and I’m fairly comfortable in that environment, they seemed to work. But certainly post the BA media fellowship, I’ve become much more useful. I’m much more comfortable as an interviewee rather than an interviewer.

What’s the one thing that you know now that had you known in the beginning, would have been really, really helpful?

LJW: I think the one thing that I’ve become much more comfortable with doing is, when a journalist phones up, saying to them, “Ok, what do you want, how long have you got?”. Not being afraid to actually question them as to what there constraints are and saying, “What do you want me to talk about, what is the focus going to be?” Then I’m prepared for the sort of questions that they’re going to be asking. I think preparation and not being on the back foot is an important thing. Be prepared to say to them “What’s the focus of your article going to be? What’s the slant?” and then being able to say “Well actually, I don’t agree with that and therefore I don’t feel like I can give you that sort of information”. If that’s going to be their slant anyway then that’s when an article is going to come out that you’re potentially not happy with; because you didn’t ask those questions in the first place.

So have you ever contacted the media with a story?

LJW: I have. They’ve tended to be science communication, so publicity more than stories, but I have provided my colleagues with the services they have, helping them write press releases and subsequently contacting the media in order to fulfil that role and get their story into the media. On the whole, I work quite a lot with press officers for the university and so I think that’s quite an important relationship to have as a scientist.

Make sure that you know your press officer or your press office and understand the role they play, because they are very good at facilitating and writing the press releases for you. There is a skill to that and I think that’s something else that we as scientists can learn; that there is this intermediary that has been trained to fulfil that role.

How do you prepare for an interview?

LJW: Well I kind of alluded to that a little bit. How I would prepare for an interview is to make sure I know the subject. It depends on the program or the journalist you’re working with. I don’t think any journalist will tell you the questions in advance because it misses the sparkle then. But find out the slant, find out exactly what they want to know. If it’s a subject that’s outside my field, then I would say to them, “Could you phone me back in two hours, I need to have a little read around this, talk to my colleagues about this and I’ll get back to you”. And making that time available to do whatever that important thing is.

Something else I’ve learnt, if you do release a story then make yourself available. Make sure you have a mobile phone or something because if they do want to write that story, they will need to get hold of you yesterday rather than in three weeks time.

How do you communicate what can be quite abstract ideas to a journalist writing for a lay audience?

LJW: It depends on your subject. As I say, in astronomy it becomes quite easy because there is a slight familiarity there. You’ve probably heard all of this before, but analogies tend to be good, trying to relate what you’re doing to the familiar and also making the journalist or the people that they’re going to be writing for, make a connection to their everyday lives. It’s something which is more difficult to do with astronomy to make the connection with everyday life, but if they see the relevance then they’re going to be more interested and it’s also going to resonate and come home to them what you’re trying to talk about.

When you’re talking to journalists, do they ever ask you to speculate? Do you respond to that or do you just not do that at all?

LJW: Again, in my field, speculation is less of a problem. They do ask you but it’s not a life and death scenario in astronomy and therefore I tend to be careful but real, for example “The evidence isn’t there as yet but one can imagine that…” I think it’s better to be careful and speculate rather than have them put a concluding sentence that they’ve totally pulled out of nowhere. If you can sort of meet them halfway without going totally wacky and off the wall, then I think that’s a safer bet, but obviously, if you’re dealing with, biological, medical issues, something like that, then I can understand that potentially one has to be very careful with the ethical and if you suddenly say, “We’re going to cure this next year”, then you’re going to be in big trouble.

What can scientists do to improve their relationship with the media?

LJW: I think the biggest thing, relating again to the fact that I’ve been on the other side of the fence, is to understand the working environment of the media and understand what they’re trying to do. The biggest eye-opener for me was learning that most of the newspapers that we read have a reading age of ten, which makes you aware of what these journalists are trying to do. They’re trying to convert cutting-edge research into something a ten year old can understand, which is one heck of a leap in communication. And also as I’ve said, making yourself available and also being aware that they have deadlines that could be half an hour, two hours, rather than our usual journal timescales of maybe a month.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

Interview with Prof Jim Al-Khalili

Theoretical Physicist and holder of a joint chair in physics and in the public engagement of science at the University of Surrey (full biog)

How did you first start talking to the media?
When were you first contacted by a newspaper?
Can you expand on your good media experiences?
Are you quite happy to go on our radio programmes even if it’s not your area?
If you have just been told in advance that they want you to appear on something that is possibly not your area, how do you prepare for that?
Have you ever contacted the media with a story?
What do you wish you could go back and tell yourself to prepare yourself for your media life?
When you know you have an interview coming up, say a print one, how do you prepare for one? Say someone has just called you up and said right I need something on this, what do you do?
What can scientists do to improve their working relationship with the media?

How did you first start talking to the media?

JAK: Through my involvement in outreach I started talking to local schools. This was about ten years ago as a lecturer for Surrey University concentrating on my research, but I have always enjoyed explaining myself to non-specialists. I just became someone who the department called upon as a user-friendly scientist. If there was anything in the department which wanted publicising or anything which came through to the department that needed someone to speak to the media, I tended to be the person that was put forward.

How did that develop? When were you first contacted by a newspaper for instance?

JAK: I think the first time was when I was involved with a committee called the PANS, Public Awareness of Nuclear Science, which is a group of European wide academics and who are basically involved in doing things to promote nuclear physics as a field of research. It’s not all about nuclear power and nuclear bombs. We’re just academics who try to dispel negative images of the ‘N’ word. We have meetings to discuss what things to do and whether to have exhibitions, to write books and to hold public lectures and so on.

The Independent Science Correspondent came along to one of our meetings and he decided he would write a piece on this and so he contacted me and one or two others for quotes. That was probably the first time there was an article about my work with quotes on me in the paper. It also happened to be one of the bad experiences.

He had written the article and sent it back to me and one or two others particle physicists asking us if it was right. Basically we were saying ‘Look, we are not involved in nuclear weapons and nuclear power. We are trying to understand how atoms are made up and how all the elements, stars etc. were created as that is what nuclear physics is all about; fundamental sky research.’

It was fine and we liked the article but of course it went from his hands to the sub editor of the newspaper who decides a) where it goes in the paper b) how much of it to chop off, but most crucially for us the headline. We didn’t see it until after it was published of course. The title was “scientists try to nuke their image”. The whole point of what we were trying to do was ruined by the very title associating us with nuclear bombs. It was then that I realised that the media aren’t there to promote our work, they’re not there to do us a favour, they’re there to do a story. They see a story and they’ll take it so we have to be careful.

What about good experiences. You have had a lot of good experiences on television and also radio. Can you expand on that?

JAK: I’ve done quite a bit of radio over the years ranging from short interviews if I’m giving a public lecture or if one of my books is coming out or if there’s something in the news that they want a comment on I’m called upon. I’ve also done a range of appearances as a guest on radio programmes; Radio 4 World Service and with Melvin Bragg on In Our Time. That’s becoming quite regular now. The producer will contact me and say “right in two weeks we have a programme on gravitons and we would like you to be a guest”. Apparently I’m Melvin Braggs favourite physicist. Favourite physics demystified. It does not matter that I’m not an expert. I know enough to be able to translate what the other guests might be saying.

So you are quite happy to go on our radio programmes even if it’s not your area?

JAK: Very much so. I think it is something that more scientists should be prepared to do if they have the experience because most of them say “Well it’s not my specialist area so I have nothing to say on the matter”. At the level the media usually operate on, in terms of wanting you to comment on something, most scientists with a background in that general field, say physics, could say something about it and it is certainly something they could research. Just Google for an hour is enough.

If you have just been told in advance that they want you to appear on something that is possibly not your area, how do you prepare for that?

JAK: If it’s a full length programme like In our Time which is a 45 minute live panel discussion on a topic which we are actually going to go into in some depth, if it’s in my area (I’ve done 1-2 on nuclear physics specifically) then I know my stuff and I don’t need to prepare too much. They will send me the form of the programme over the phone, just going over topics they might want to ask and quotes and explanations ready for when we cover that area.

Sometimes it might be the Today programme who want to interview me about a particular item in the news and it’s not my area. For example I got contacted recently about something in the news about whether the Big Bang really happened or not and if the Big Bang theory is in jeopardy? They asked me and Simon Singh to comment on this. I just had to quickly Google to see what this item of news was which I hadn’t been aware of until they contacted me. What was it and what was the paper saying. Apparently it wasn’t quite as serious as I thought. The level they wanted from me was what is the big bang, who said there was a big bang, where does it come from - it comes from Einstein’s theory of relativity, how do we know - there is some evidence of it in astronomy. Stuff that I’m used to explaining.

Sometimes it’s more specific. There’s one occasion when I was asked to comment on a new experiment that had just been set up and got going called Gravity Probe B. This is where they positioned satellites in orbit around Earth and they send signals to each other. They have gyroscopes which measure their angle and orientation and orbit. This is a test of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Because of the Earth’s gravity and spinning, it drags space-time around it. Something that Einstein had predicted happened but no-one had ever seen. It’s a really, really tiny effect and very subtle. This experiment will detect it.

I knew nothing about this but I was asked if I could be interviewed on some news programme, I think it was Radio 4, about this so I thought “OK give me an hour to do some homework”. I said live on air that’s what this experiment is about and that is what it’s trying to do - to measure. It’s more important to explain what they want to ask me in typical language; to explain some basic ideas rather than get into the nitty gritty.

Have you ever contacted the media with a story? Or do you always wait for them?

JAK: The time when I did contact the media was actually just after I’d done this programme for Channel 4, Einstein’s Brain. They thought it was going to be for some months in advance, and then they realised that the BBC was doing a similar programme, it being Einstein year last year, so they brought the transmission date forward. Suddenly it was very, very short notice and they couldn’t do the publicising that they really wanted to do for it so Mark Lythgoe and I, the presenters, said “we’ll do what we can”.

I got in touch with a journalist saying “Look we have got this programme, do you want to write a piece on it to publicise it?” So they said “well what is the story?”. “Well we had a look at Einstein’s brain”. “Well what did you discover, was there something new about it”.

I know by this time what they are looking for, they want some hook to put the story on, something relevant in the story that has to be told today which was too early to be told yesterday, too late to be told tomorrow. Of course this wasn’t that type of story so I didn’t get any bites.

That’s one of the few occasions I got in touch with the media myself. Normally they come to me. There’s only really one other occasion when I was trying to publicise a conference that I was helping to organise on Nuclear Physics. Together with the Institute of Physics we put out a press release which got picked up and on to the Today programme. We made it fun, because no-one really cares whether the nuclear physics academic conference is going on in Edinburgh, but the hook we had was that we did a survey of the general public asking ‘Do you know what particle 99.9% of everything in the universe is made of?’ and we listed the 5 particles of course. The answer was quark which is not something most people know. We knew that and only 2% got the right answer. This is what they wanted to pick up - Does it matter? That was something I was proactive in trying to get interest in.

So because of your experience you realise you have to have that hook and you look for that?

JAK: Exactly. Just because I think there is an interesting bit of research, either what I may have done or my colleague may have done, that doesn’t necessarily mean the rest of the world is going to find it interesting. They want to find some relevance to it. A hook to hang it onto. Why is that relevant now, why should anyone be interested in it now.

Thinking about young scientist abilities and the stage you are at now, what do you wish you had known when you were a young research scientist yourself compared to what you know now? What do you wish you could go back and tell yourself to prepare yourself for your media life?

JAK: Well, I suppose it’s not to be so scared of the media. A lot of young scientists hear all the scare stories and it’s an ‘us and them’ situation. The issue is that they think you have to be a specialist or only ever say something about your own area of research. What I would have liked to have known and a message to young researchers, is not to be afraid.

The media are looking for a story, they are not looking to shoot us down, they are not making us out to be bad people, or good people. They don’t really care. It’s not really their job to promote our field for us or indeed to show what may interest us. All they are looking for is a story. The message is this; if we can find the story for them to use, they will use it, they are happy to use it. We should make their lives easier, and by doing so we are more likely to get out the message we want.

So when you know you have an interview coming up, say a print one, how do you prepare for one? Say someone has just called you up and said right I need something on this, what do you do?

JAK: If it’s in my area, something I know a lot about or something that I have commentated about before, I will go back and look at what I’ve written before. I may go back and leaf through one of my books. The soundbites, the nice analogies and the way of explaining things I’ve already thought about and I’ve got it down. I just remind myself of how I explain things. That’s quite easy.

If it’s something that’s not in my area I will probably do some research whether it’s on the internet or otherwise. I did a programme when Melvin Bragg had a recent series on ITV called The South Bank Show. It was a series of programmes called The Twelve Books that Changed the World and one of them was Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. I was asked to be the expert interviewed as the contributor on the part of the programme talking about Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.

Because I was going to be interviewed on camera I had to go to the library and borrow The Principia and find out what it was all about. I knew it was an important book and that he discovered all these laws of motion and laws of gravity but I didn’t know much else about it. So that actually involved getting some books out and actually doing some studying. It’s usually not quite as hard a job as that. Normally it is just internet searching for half an hour to an hour, printing off a few bits of relevant paper and highlighting the important facts and figures.

Finally, what can scientists do to improve their working relationship with the media?

JAK: I think it’s useful for the scientists to do some sort of media training to learn about how to write a press release. Not all scientists are cut out to be science communicators. Not all of them are able to empathise with the general public or people who are outside their field and explain things in a very simple way without using jargon. That is not to say they couldn’t learn something about how the media works. Media workshops are run by various institutes, The Science Media Centre for instance. It would be nice for science departments at universities to make available media workshops and to encourage PhD students, post docs and academics to attend - just so they know the simple message that the media is not there to criticise science, nor is it there to promote science. It’s there to tell a story.

If you provide them with a story that is topical and relevant, they will take it. It’s knowing how to pitch the story. If you make a discovery there is no point saying “I have calculated the cross-section for the creation of the sub-atomic particle that interacts with other particles.” It might be interesting for you, it might be interesting to publish a paper on it, or to present a paper at a conference but it’s no easy distinction between the news story within science or the news story to the rest of the public. I think these media workshops would be very helpful. Also to tell people not to be so scared and not to see journalists in particular print media as printing the unrealisable and exaggerated, telling lies and things like that. They are looking for the story.

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Last updated: October 05 2006

What does a press officer do?

One piece of advice for early-career scientists that was offered again and again was to get to know your press officer; they are there to help. So for those of you who may not be clear exactly what it is a press officer does, or how they can help you, then read our interview with Aeron Haworth to find out.

Interview with Aeron Haworth

Media officer for life sciences, University of Manchester

What would you do if a young scientist wanted to put a story out?
What would you do if a journalist rang you up out of the blue and said I hear you’ve got something exciting, can you tell me all about it?
If it was a young scientist who was being contacted, a PhD or Post-doc rather than a professor, would a press officer talk to them first before they talk to the media?
If it was a young scientist who’d brought out a paper and they were driving the research, would you ever suggest media to speak to them rather than their supervisors?
How would you prepare a young scientist for, say, a radio interview?
Every PhD has a story so what would you deem particularly interesting or sexy? Would you prefer it if it were published somewhere beforehand, like a journal?
Do you find that press releases are better, especially for someone with little experience with the media?
Do the attitudes of scientists to media interviews differ depending upon whether the journalist is coming from a tabloid or somewhere like the BBC?
On the project there was a lot of fear about misrepresentation amongst young scientists, would it be managed by you?
Would you encourage young scientists to get involved with the media?

What would you do if a young scientist wanted to put a story out?

AH: If a scientist has a story that they want to put out and we don’t think that it is going to get particularly good coverage in the lay-media but were in specialist publications such as trade magazines, then we hand them a PR Toolkit which has lots of useful information about why you should be doing a press release, how to put a press-release together and how to achieve what you hope it is going to achieve.

There are some useful websites as well and information from the Science Media Centre - they have a number of tip sheets - one about communicating uncertainty, a lot on animal testing etc. and tips on how to answer questions. Also, tips on how to generate publicity from the BA.

What would you do if a journalist rang you up out of the blue and said I hear you’ve got something exciting, can you tell me all about it?

AH: Journalists normally ring up either because they are responding to a press release that we’ve put out or because there is a topic in the news that they think we have experts in that field. The way the press office speaks to journalists is different as they aren’t going to take quotes from us, it is very rare. Occasionally they’ll put us down as a spokesperson but that is by prior arrangement. Normally we put them on to an expert in the University. We have spoken to someone at the university who might not want to be quoted or discuss with the journalists so we’ll put together a press statement and give them that.

Most of the time we have two roles, the pro-active role that we are particularly keen about since the merger (Merger of UMIST and University of Manchester), going out and finding stories that are interesting from a young scientist or whoever has done the research. It could be to do with public engagement, grant success, prizes won. We discuss with the scientist and formulate a press release to target their work to the media. The other side is the reactive side, where, it is our job to find the expert and help them out.

If it was a young scientist who was being contacted, a PhD or Post-doc rather than a professor, would a press officer talk to them first before they talk to the media?

AH: Yes. Most journalists know big institutions like this have press offices and they mainly contact us because we know the institution better than they will. Although we don’t know it all we like to try! We have a press officer per faculty so we are getting to know who is doing what, meeting people and I build up a database of people in Life Sciences, a lay-database, so every time I meet someone I just jot down what they do in my non-scientific brain.

If it was a young scientist who’d brought out a paper and they were driving the research, would you ever suggest media to speak to them rather than their supervisors?

AH: No, anyone can talk to the media, it is only if they are comfortable in doing so. It is not really a problem particularly with the lay media as most of the information they want is pretty simple. When we write a press release we tend to take a lot of the science out of it and focus on the implications and applications rather than what they did; what society is interested in.

So what if it wasn’t a press release, say a radio interview?

AH: What we would do is run a media training session with them. If it was a young scientist, like a PhD student, who came to me with a story about some research that they have done, I would draft a press release with them and suggest they do media training. It is primarily for broadcasting, that is the most difficult one to get used to, but it gives you tips like talk slow, be calm and work out what you are going to say beforehand. It is run by our former head of communications, Phil Radcliffe. He sits five or six people down and interviews them like on a TV programme whilst they are filmed.

It’s quite scary. I’ve just been on it so I can sympathise with anyone who is going to get involved with the media! Then you go through it again and comment to see if you can do it better.

Every PhD has a story so what would you deem particularly interesting or sexy? Would you prefer it if it were published somewhere beforehand, like a journal?

AH: Yes. Journalists, particularly on the nationals, prefer something if it has been peer reviewed. It doesn’t necessarily have to be published. If someone wins an award then they have been picked via peer review, for example a society prize or North-West science awards. The other opportunity is when the project starts off and they want to announce a project is starting and what they hope to achieve.

Do you find that press releases are better, especially for someone with little experience with the media?

Press releases are the easiest way of saying exactly what you want to say and so it is the way we prefer. You get the message you want to get across rather than the reactive side where you don’t always know where that journalist is going with it. Most of the time they are honest with you but occasionally you get a rogue journalist who isn’t telling you everything.

Does that often depend upon whether they are coming from a tabloid as opposed to the BBC or somewhere like that?

AH: Yes. We had a call yesterday from The Sun about a press release that we issued about a year ago which was fairly controversial saying that going out in the sunshine at midday for a limited amount of time is good for you because of vitamin D. Now the academic got quite a lot of publicity for that last year but she is quite reluctant to speak to The Sun simply because of the way The Sun reports things. She’s not sure or confident that they’ll report the whole thing for example saying that going out in the midday sun and frying is good.

So we discuss that with the academic and with the journalist to see exactly how simplified she is going to make it and how to get the balanced story across.

On the project there was a lot of fear about misrepresentation amongst young scientists. Would it be managed by you?

AH: We try to make sure that doesn’t happen and press releases are the easiest way of avoiding confusion. But journalists don’t want to misrepresent people, it is not their job. It is their job to be accurate otherwise they wouldn’t be good journalists. It doesn’t occur that often at all.

Would you encourage young scientists to get involved with the media?

AH: Yes, definitely. It is important for scientists to engage the media and, apart from anything else, people outside the universities need to know what is going on in universities; it is public money being spent. It is good to tell them what is going on. It is also good to encourage young people to become scientists. If scientists can’t talk about the merits of their work then no-one can and how are we going to get the next generation of scientists? It doesn’t have to be a long either, sometimes journalists just want a soundbite. We try and get the person who is the closest to expert as possible but often I could answer the questions with my O-level biology!

back to press officers’ top tips

Last updated: October 05 2006

Press officers’ top tips

We asked press officers from universities around the country, all well-versed in the interaction of scientists and journalists, to give us their best advice to scientists who are preparing to face the media. Here are their top tips.

Dr Claire Bithell
Nicola Buckley and Genevieve Maul
Emma Darling
Dr Jenny Gimpel
Ronnie Kerr

Dr Claire Bithell

press officer for the SMC (full biog)

Preparation: I think that young scientists should start preparing from the moment they start their PhDs to talk to the press. At some point in their research careers most young scientists will have to talk about their research to the media. The main thing is not to wait until you are contacted by a journalist. Assume that you are going to do it and start preparing.
Get to know your press officer. Go and meet them if you have a chance and get their number. Have it on your mobile or computer. If you are contacted by the press, your press officer should be able to tell you who they are. They will also give you advice on whether or not you need media training.
Before you get immersed in academia, start thinking about how to talk about science without using jargon. It is better to start practising when you are at a lower level and not to have to start from scratch. The downside of not explaining it is simply that journalists will then try and explain it in their terms, which is where you start to get inaccuracies. By simplifying it you are ensuring the journalist gets it right.

Look at different types of media and see how they cover things. One day a week buy a range of newspapers to get an idea of how different newspapers cover different things, and don’t ignore the tabloids. The Sun has a daily readership of 3m, The Guardian has about 400,000. If you don’t talk to the tabloids you are not ensuring maximum readership. Listen to different radio stations as well 5 Live and Radio 2, and see what they talk about, what stories get them interested.
Scientists, especially young scientists, think that when talking to journalists on a particular subject, they have to be the expert and are very hung up on their publishing record. But if you have done your PhD in that subject you are an expert, it doesn’t matter if someone in London has published two more papers on it than you. Young scientists are concerned they aren’t the best qualified and so don’t do the interview. If they don’t do the interview and the journalist can’t get hold of the other researcher then the article will be run but without any comment.

Nicola Buckley and Genevieve Maul

Cambridge University Press Office

Find out what makes a good story. Because when you’re very caught up in research you think “I’ve got to put a press release out about this, this is really important” but unless it’s of interest to a wider audience it won’t get picked up. I just recently went on training last week at the Institute of Public Relations on sending in your stories and it was very good for focusing on what makes a story and the mnemonic she had was “TRUTH” T if it’s topical or timely - that’s what makes a news story R if it’s relevant to an audience U is if it’s unusual or even better unique T again, is trouble - we all know that makes a news story H is human interest.
It’s useful if you have any kind of visual - you’ll notice today in The Guardian, people were actually able to create a new species of butterfly in three months, which is phenomenal. But what captured the story was the photo. You’ll see that in every one of the broadsheets today. So have something visual and the news desk is more inclined to pick up that science story.

Find out about the journalist - there’s nothing wrong with taking a second and saying, “Can I call you back?” and at that point you search and see what kind of journalist they are.
Before you just start talking about something, it’s always good to have in your head what you may say with some of the responses - some of the more controversial questions that can arise. It’s important to know this before going into an actual interview and there’s nothing wrong with telling someone “OK, I can’t talk right now, can you give me five minutes, can you give me 15 minutes?”
You have to realise when you’re doing these interviews, they’re going to cut it down to maybe a 30 second clip, or a three line quote, so it is better to have something that is nice and accurate but concise that they can use, rather than going on and on, being vague and not really having that nice soundbite.
Everything’s more beneficial to the scientist if they actually do contact the office. We have the skills, we can tell you whether it’s worthwhile and we have the contacts if it is of interest. So you can rely on our expertise.
It is always worth registering on the University’s expertise guide - most Universities will have one of these online with their press office. Then the press office can search the database when they get those calls and put the right people in touch.

Emma Darling

Cardiff University Press Office

Try to consider how society/the public/industry could ultimately benefit from your research. Another useful angle is if your research represents “a first”.
Add your details to the university’s directory of expertise. Reporters are often looking for expert comment to include in their article. Most universities have a directory of expertise with contact details for academics willing to provide expert comment to the media.
Keep your message clear and accurate. Remember you are not addressing your peers (equally don’t comment if it’s not your area of expertise or you’ll soon hear about it from your peers!)

Deadlines are very important to reporters. Return calls as soon as possible and particularly when you have initiated a press release, make sure the public relations office is clear of your availability and contact details.
Remember your co-authors! If you’re working on a press release remember to credit any collaborators at your own or other institutions and check they are happy with the release before it is issued.

Dr Jenny Gimpel

UCL Press Office (full biog)

Tell us about your papers before they come out Journalists and press officers want to hear about your findings - before they come out! Yes, we know you are anxious to protect your work but this is where the good old embargo system comes in - in fact, it has evolved to meet this very need. An old paper is old news, but a paper that has just been accepted gives your pressed-for-time press officer a chance to assess whether there is a story in it, and contact the journal to check the embargo rules. Journalists like to receive press releases a few days before the embargo lifts, to give them time to look into the story, send a few jokes round the office and then write it up.

Don’t be too sensitive about what is written about you. The first time you see yourself quoted, you’ll probably feel anxious or think ‘did I really say that?’ Gnash your teeth and clutch your hair if the moment demands it, but try not to worry. Almost inevitably, a few errors will appear in media reports given that many interviews are conducted over the phone, at busy times of the day or when journalists are struggling to meet deadlines. If something is grossly inaccurate, do write to the editor for a correction, but if the errors are minor or the gist of the story remains accurate, it’s often best, in the words of the Beatles, to Let It Be.
Aim to be clear rather than strictly accurate This is especially important for radio or TV, where your listeners will only hear the story once and you may only have 20 seconds to summarise you research. For example, “We found that a third of young men smoke up to a pack a day” is much easier to grasp first time than “Of the 2,757 participants interviewed, 29 per cent of males in the age bracket 18 to 30 smoked between 10 and 20 cigarettes a day”. People rarely talk like that unless they are in an episode of X-Files, and most people will only remember the gist of what is said or written anyway. I’ll bet you a Mars Bar you can’t recall the full details of even one science story reported a week ago.
Be prepared and be flexible. Don’t be surprised if an interview turns out differently to what you were expecting - didn’t your mother warn you life would be like that? It’s useful to learn to talk more generally about your work, discuss speculative areas or even comment on other areas of research (provided you feel knowledgeable enough to do so). Try to avoid saying things like “I don’t want to comment on that” or “It’s not my area of expertise”. Instead, introduce topics you can talk about using “I think a more pressing issue is…” or “I’m not sure about xxx, but I can tell you that yyy…”. Politicians are skilled at turning questions to their advantage and delivering an answer that mostly contains information they wanted to get across, regardless of the theme of the interview. Not that it will improve their chances of me voting for them.

Return our calls If a journalist or press officer leaves a message saying they need to speak to you urgently, chances are they do. So please, pretty please, return our call ASAP. If you’re in the Bahamas, I’m happy to call you back to pay for the call and naturally I will respect your wish not be disturbed during Happy Hour. I aim to get back to journalists within 10 minutes of their call, to tell them that I have found an expert, that no one is available or that I will keep trying to reach someone. This allows them to ring another university if they think I might not locate an expert in time.

Ronnie Kerr

University of Edinburgh Press Office

Number one, you can’t make it too simple or clear enough. Always try for clarity. This can be done without losing accuracy and without compromising your research. Assume your listener knows nothing about your research. The best way to prevent misreporting is to put your research across clearly.
Don’t play ball with journalists trying to over-sensationalise research.

When you put your research into the public domain you do lose a certain degree of control over what is written, but that’s a fact of life.
None of us know everything - stick to what you know.
People like a bit of informed opinion, they like asking experts thing.
Good manners and a bit of humility and good grace go a long way. You don’t often see that in the scientific community, speaking as an outsider. Academics can come across as being very arrogant.
What people forget is that most journalists are doing a very good job. Most of reporters are doing a heroic job. They are trying to grapple with stuff that is very complex in a very short space of time and they are just doing the best they can. No-one sets out to write an inaccurate article.
Putting a smile on your face will stand you in good stead.

Keep it in perspective. People think that their research is the biggest thing since the Kennedy assassination so you need a bit of perspective. The world is not going to revolve around the interview you give or the coverage you get. What was it that Cliff Richard said; if you sell 1 million records, it means that 59 million people didn’t buy it. Your career is not going to hit the rocks just because someone misquotes you.

To find out more about what a press officer does, read our interview with Aeron Haworth who is the media officer for life sciences at the University of Manchester.

Last updated: October 05 2006

Our partners

their comments on Standing up for Science

Here you can find out about the organisations that supported the development of this guide and why they think it is important to get involved. We would like to thank all of them for their help during the production of Standing up for Science, a process in which they have been actively involved commenting on drafts of the guide, design and content, as well as financial support.

The Biochemical Society

The Biochemical Society is the largest UK Society active in the Life Sciences and a major UK publisher of scientific journals. Their mission is to promote Molecular and Cellular Bioscience and, especially, to support younger scientists who are embarking on their careers.

“The advances that have been made in the molecular biosciences in recent years have opened up new research areas and have the potential to bring great benefit to the Biosphere and all that inhabit it. At the same time, these advances are coming under increasing scrutiny by the press and public. It is important that today’s scientists can stand up to explain and defend their research, both in the media and to a lay audience. The Biochemical Society believes that training to accomplish these ends should be available to all young scientists. That is why we are proud to be associated with Standing up for Science.”

Dr Chris Kirk, Chief Executive, The Biochemical Society

Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services and part of Reed Elsevier Group plc. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect, MD Consult, Scopus, bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

“Not surprisingly, the original media advice in the Standing up for Science guide for young scientists is relevant across the entire career spectrum. We’re happy to report that Sense About Science has made yet another excellent contribution to the prominence of good science in the mainstream media.”

Adrian Mulligan, Elsevier’s Associate Director, Research & Academic Relations.

The Physiological Society

Founded in 1876, The Physiological Society is a learned society with approximately 2,500 members drawn from over 50 countries. The majority of the members are engaged in research, in universities or industry, into how the body works. The Society’s main aims are to promote the advancement of physiology and to facilitate communication, both between scientists and with other stakeholders. To achieve these objectives, the Society supports scientific meetings, publishes two journals and awards grants to allow members to travel and collaborate. Interaction with outside bodies is encouraged through representation on various councils and committees, educational activities, and active membership of the Biosciences Federation.

“The Physiological Society recognises the importance for effective science communication, of encouraging our young scientists to talk to the media, and therefore to the general public, about their research and scientific issues of interest to the community at large. The Society, like many of its sister Learned Societies, provides Communication Skills training for our young members. We hope that the Guide will whet our young scientists’ appetites and encourage them to get involved with our Society in this important area”.

Elizabeth Bell, Deputy Executive Secretary / Head of External Affairs, The Physiological Society

The Royal Astronomical Society

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is the UK’s leading professional body for astronomy and astrophysics, geophysics, solar and solar-terrestrial physics, and planetary sciences. The RAS organises scientific meetings, publishes research and review journals. The Society also awards grants and prizes, maintains an extensive library, supports educational activities and lobbies government. Its central London premises are available for the use of its Fellows.

“In this day of mass communication, there have never been so many sources of scientific information. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that these sources of information are reliable or authoritative. The only way to redress the balance is to encourage scientists to explain their research and the implications of this research for society. The RAS considers that it is vital for our future that the next generation of scientists should be willing and able to contribute to public discussion of science.”

Peter Bond, Press Officer, The Royal Astronomical Society

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) is the professional and regulatory body for pharmacists in England, Scotland and Wales. It also regulates pharmacy technicians on a voluntary basis, which is expected to become statutory under anticipated legislation. The primary objectives of the Society are to lead, regulate, develop and represent the profession of pharmacy.

“The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain is delighted to support the “Standing up for Science” guide. Science is increasingly in the news and it is important for scientists to be confident about making their voice heard through the media. The scientist’s perspective on a news story can bring clarity and help further the public’s understanding of important and complex issues. This practical guide is full of tips and encouragement and I welcome its publication.”

Professor Stephen Denyer, Chairman of the RPSGB Science Committee

The Royal Society of Chemistry

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is the largest organisation in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences. Supported by a network of 43,000 members worldwide and an internationally acclaimed publishing business, its activities span education and training, conferences and science policy, and the promotion of the chemical sciences to the public.

“Communicating research is crucial for all scientists - but being able to communicate well to the media needs a whole new set of skills that aren’t taught to young scientists. The RSC is delighted to sponsor this guide which will give them insight into the media and how to get their message across.”

Dr Rachel Brazil, Manager, Science Policy Communications, The Royal Society of Chemistry

Science Careers.org

Science Careers.org is a global online career magazine published by the research journal Science. The site offers career management tools, articles from Next Wave - the editorial voice of science careers, news, workshops and jobs for scientists.

“We were keen to support the Standing up For Science guide as it will provide a much-needed resource for early career researchers - a target group for our magazine. Dealing with the media is a topic that is rarely addressed at the grass roots level of science and the guide will give a valuable insight into how the media works which can only serve to help and encourage scientists to communicate about their work to a wider audience.”

Seema Sharma, European Programme Director, Science Careers.org

The Society for Applied Microbiology

The Society for Applied Microbiology is the voice of Applied Microbiology within the UK. SfAM works in partnership with sister organisations and microbiological bodies to ensure that microbiology and microbiologists are able to exert influence on policy-makers within the UK, in Europe and world-wide. The Society plays a leading role in working with many different organisations to educate, inform and support the training of our future microbiologists.

The Society for General Microbiology

The Society for General Microbiology (SGM) was founded in 1945 to bring together scientists involved in all areas of microbiology. It holds international scientific meetings and publishes cutting edge research findings through its four journals. SGM also advances microbiology in many other ways through grants, prize lectures and educational activities and its high profile role in UK and international biological organisations. The Society is particularly active in promoting the science and profession of microbiology to government, the media and the general public.

“With so many scientific issues in the headlines affecting not only our own well-being but that of the planet, it has never been more important for scientists to interact pro-actively with the media. The sooner in their career that scientists get into the habit of speaking out to the press, the better. The Society for General Microbiology is therefore delighted to support this guide, which seeks to encourage early-career scientists to communicate enthusiastically and clearly to the media about their work.”

Janet Hurst, Deputy Executive Secretary, External Relations & Grants Manager, Society for General Microbiology

Last updated: June 28 2007

Meet the VoYS writing team

Our VoYS writing team consists of early career scientists who feel passionately about the importance of good science in public debate and wanted to get more involved in standing up for science. Here is a little bit more about them and why they think it is important for early career scientists to promote evidence and good science for the public.

Sheena Elliott

Sheena did her undergraduate degree in physics at Bath with a placement year at CERN, Geneva and then spent a year working in industry. Sheena is now finishing her PhD in Cambridge, studying semiconducting polymers. She has been involved with outreach work including being a ‘Researcher in Residence’ at a local school and demonstrating experiments on The Naked Scientists radio show.

“It is vital that scientists communicate their research to as wide an audience as possible if they expect to receive financial backing from public funds, particularly in fields which are seen as more controversial for ethical reasons or “blue sky” research where the benefits may not be so apparent. I think younger scientists have to be involved in this in order to connect with the younger community, and also to become more aware of how the public perceive their work.”

Haley Gomez

Haley has a degree in astrophysics from Cardiff University and recently completed a PhD in the origin of cosmic dust also at Cardiff. She is currently a research fellow with the Commission for the Royal Exhibition of 1851. She has been involved in media not only regarding her research but also in discussions about women in science and prospects for young scientists.

“I think it’s very important for young scientists to be involved with the media. We can provide a different point of view on research (possibly breaking stereotypes), as well as what it means to be a scientist. I also believe that the stronger the links we build between science and the media, the closer we get to the public. “

Julie Huxley-Jones

After finishing her degree in genetics at Manchester University, Julie is continuing her love of all things science by doing a PhD in molecular biology and evolution (also at Manchester). She can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

“To be a great scientist you need to be able to communicate both your work and your enthusiasm for why you do what you do. When most people think of scientists they don’t think of younger people. This is re-enforced when science is represented in the media, usually by professors and others higher up the career path. I think communication from young scientists works on multiple levels. Firstly it begins to dispel the caricature image of the scientist (older, crazy hair, glasses!) and it can encourage other young people to do science too. It is imperative that young researchers take part in science debates, communication and representation, especially regarding the work that is being done out there as it is usually performed by them!”

Richard Newell

Richard gained his BSc in physics from King’s College London in 2004. Following this he briefly worked within the financial industry before deciding to return to King’s College to undertake a Masters in x-ray optics for which he is currently studying.

“In an increasingly technology driven society science necessarily affects all aspects of peoples lives, so any method of tackling the ongoing trend amongst the populace of apathy toward the sciences is worthwhile. Amongst the most important defenders of science and the scientific method must of course be scientists themselves, so it is good to see the voice of young scientists being presented to the general public.”

Lorna Nichols

Lorna Nichols studied for a degree in chemistry at the University of Durham. She is currently in the final stages of completing a PhD in inorganic synthetic and structural chemistry at the University of Southampton and she will start a career in scientific research and the development of household products in September.

“I think it is very important to help make science more accessible to people and to help create a greater understanding between the general public and the scientific community. Many scientific research projects are funded by public money and as scientists we have a duty to explain how this is of benefit. I believe we can help to do this by being more transparent and by communicating our research to the public using terminology that is comprehensible to non specialists whenever we get the opportunity.”

Kate Oliver

Since graduating in pathology at Cambridge University, Kate has tried her hand communicating in labs, health and education, and has now found her calling explaining animal biology at London Zoo, where she gets to see tigers every day.

“Much of the public doesn’t think ‘young scientists’ exist, preferring to imagine that the balding men with glasses reproduce themselves by some form of asexual fission. But the young scientists that you don’t see in the media can actually be the easiest for people to relate to: nearer the edge of the scientific community, more in touch with ‘normal people’. Most of us are also bursting with enthusiasm for what we do, which brings people the message that science isn’t just important, it might even be interesting! From giving fresh perspectives in debates to showing kids why science is relevant to them, young scientists can educate and entertain the public, if only we tell them we exist!”

Dr Nicola Powles-Glover

Nicola has a joint honours degree in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of London and a Masters degree in biological research methods at the University of Exeter. She studied for a PhD from the University of Reading and currently works as an investigative scientist in the Early Development Group at the MRC Mammalian Genetics Unit.

“Public engagement is a skill that is fundamental to our development but is often forgotten in general training. It is essential to ensure that public engagement work becomes an intrinsic part of a scientist’s life. I strongly believe that it is an important responsibility of our work as scientists to bridge the gap between our knowledge and the general understanding of science. Scientists need to be encouraged to be more open and accessible about their work.”

Harriet Teare

Harriet Teare is just starting her second year as a chemistry DPhil at the University of Oxford, in the research group of Veronique Gouverneur. Her research involves Fluorine-18 labelling in Positron Emission Tomography. When not in the lab she can often be found kick-boxing or on the river.

Carolyn Tregidgo

Carolyn is currently doing a PhD at King’s College London, investigating fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy and it’s applications to biomedical sciences. Before coming to King’s she did her undergraduate degree at Imperial College London and spent a year abroad in Spain completing her Masters project as part of the MSci Physics with a year in Europe. She is also the editor for the Sense About Science web based Reading Room.

“I think it is important for young scientists to get involved in public debates about science as it gives an important perspective on topical issues and encourages them to be aware of how important their work is on a wider level and how to communicate it to a wider audience.”

Alice Tuff

Alice Tuff completed a degree in cell biology and pathology at St Andrews University. She has been working as an intern at Sense about Science for the last 3 months before taking a break to go travelling. She intends to pursue a career in Science Communications.

“Everyday the public is bombarded with information about new scientific discoveries in all manner of areas which will affect their lives. It is the duty of all scientists to ensure that the best information is provided to them because public opinion can have a huge influence on scientific policies. It is easy to become so immersed in the science of a subject that we forget our results will often be thrown into the public domain.”

Sander van Kasteren

After his chemistry degree at Edinburgh University, Sander is currently in the final stages of his DPhil at Oxford University where he works in the field of carbohydrate chemistry and its implications in disease.

“We are currently living in one of the most exciting times Science has seen for a very long time. Amazing discoveries are made on a near weekly basis. Yet the non-scientific public seem not to realise, or care, about this very much at all. To a lot of people, Science is something slightly nerdy that they have spent a lot of time avoiding at school. Everybody is happy to utilise the fruits of our labours, but not to accept and acknowledge the work and sacrifice that has gone into achieving these. Giving people an understanding not just of what the amazing results are, but how amazing and challenging getting these results has actually been will hopefully teach people a new found respect and love for this beautiful subject.”

Richard Van Noorden

Richard has a Masters degree in chemistry from Cambridge University, specialising in pharmaceutical materials chemistry. He now writes for Chemistry World, the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Check out the Chemistry World blog for which Richard writes
Listen to the Chemistry World podcast for which Richard is a member of the presenting team

“I think it’s important for young scientists to communicate with the media so that science is seen as fresh, exciting, and understandable. This will encourage people to take an active interest in the scientific research shaping all of our futures.”

Dr Debbie Wake

Debbie studied medicine at Edinburgh University and has just completed a PhD looking at the role of steroid metabolism in obesity. She also masquerades in cyberspace as Dr Pod with her own science and health podcast series and writes regularly for The Scotsman newspaper. Debbie can also be found on our Contributors page.

Listen to Debbie’s weekly podcast ‘Dr Pod’

“We rely on public support and awareness of science for ongoing funding and appropriate ethical guidance. Further, good communication of science is essential to educate and change practice. We need the media for mass public communication but often feel let down when the wrong message is conveyed. Better working relations and mutual understanding between scientists and the media is required and young scientists should be encouraged to engage with the media and bring science to the public arena whenever possible.”

Petra Wark

Petra has an MSc in biomedical health sciences from Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She will defend her PhD thesis in cancer epidemiology (diet, lifestyle and colorectal cancer) at Wageningen University, the Netherlands in January 2007. Petra is currently working as a research fellow in cancer epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“Even if a scientist is not interested in contacting journalists directly him/herself, I believe it is important that they are prepared to be contacted by the media as one day a journalist may just give them a ring after a study of theirs has been published. If this happens and the scientist knows what to expect and what to do and what not to do, it increases the chances of the content of their research being reflected well in the article written.”

Last updated: October 29 2007

Contributors

In putting together this guide we interviewed scientists, journalists, and press officers. Below you can read all about those who offered their advice to early-career scientists for the guide and you will find links to the full interview transcripts and top tips.

The Scientists

Professor Jim Al-Khalili

(read interview)

Professor Jim Al-Khalili is a theoretical physicist and senior lecturer at the University of Surrey. In 1998, he was chosen as the Institute of Physics’ Schools and Colleges Lecturer, which meant touring the country talking to 14-18 year olds about cosmology. In 1999 he published his first book, Black Holes, Wormholes and Time machines, based on the lectures. In 2000 he received an IoP award for the Public Awareness of Physics and was elected a Fellow of the Institute. He has since written two more books: Nucleus: A Trip into the Heart of Matter and Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed. He has given hundreds of public lectures around the world, is a regular contributor to television and radio science programmes and presented his first TV documentary this year for Channel 4: The Riddle of Einstein’s Brain. He was one of the judges for FameLab and also a judge on the Aventis science book prize panel. He is a council member for the British Association and the advisory group for Cheltenham Science Festival. He currently holds a joint chair in physics and in the public engagement of science at Surrey.

Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright

(read interview)

Lisa Jardine-Wright is a post-doctoral researcher and science communication officer for the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and the astronomy researcher for a brand new development at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. She studied at Trinity College, where she did an MA and an MSci in experimental and theoretical physics. After completing her PhD in theoretical astrophysics in 2002, Lisa stayed at the University of Cambridge to continue her research looking at the formation and evolution of spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. Lisa lectures in mathematics for the University and teaches astronomy for the Department of Continuing Education. She often gives talks on astronomy to the general public, and in 2004 was awarded a BA Media Fellowship to work as a science writer for the Financial Times.

Emma King

(read interview)

Emma completed her MPhys degree in physics with astrophysics at the University of Sussex, after which she made her way to the University of Nottingham where she is now in the final year of a cosmology PhD. During her time at university she has been engaged in a number of science communication projects, from giving talks in schools and at science fiction conventions to proof reading popular science books. These involved several brushes with the media; she has been interviewed for a number of newspaper articles as well as on a radio broadcast and was the subject of a short Open University TV programme. After her PhD she is considering a career in science communication and so may end up on the other side of the fence.

Dr Robin Lovell-Badge

(read interview)

Dr Robin Lovell-Badge is the head of the Division of Developmental Genetics at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London. His main areas of interest and research are genetics, sex determination, early embryonic development and the biology and uses of stem cells. His work towards the wider communication of science has included lectures to school children for the Wellcome Trust and NIMR 6th Form Science Programmes, numerous media interviews and he has participated in debates at public meetings and on radio and TV. He has also spoken on stem cell research and therapeutic cloning in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an honorary professor at University College, London and visiting professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Hong Kong. He serves on various committees and advisory councils and was recently elected president of the Institute of Animal Technologists. He is also the author of about a hundred and fifty research papers, book chapters and reviews, plus a handful of newspaper articles.

Dr Milo Shaffer

(read interview)

Dr Milo Shaffer is a lecturer in nanomaterials chemistry with the Electronic Materials Research Section at Imperial College, London. He has extensive experience of manipulation, functionalisation and characterisation of carbon nanomaterials and has studied a wide variety of nanotube composite systems, including both structural matrices and conducting polymers for electrochemical applications. Current interests include both carbon and inorganic nanotube synthesis, modification, characterisation and application. He completed his PhD in 1998 in the Department of Materials Science in Cambridge. Following a period working as a materials technology consultant at Scientific Generics, focusing on technology exploitation and innovation, he enjoyed a research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He took up his current position in January 2003 and is also a visiting lecturer within Cranfield’s MSc in nanotechnology program.

Dr Carly Stevens

(read interview)

Carly Stevens earned a first class BSc (Hons) in environmental life science at the University of Nottingham in 2000, moving to Wolverhampton University for her MSc in environmental science the following year on a scholarship for excellence in science. In 2004 she completed her PhD working jointly between the Departments of Earth Sciences and Biological Sciences at The Open University in Milton Keynes and the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Cambridgeshire. Her project crossed the fields of biogeochemistry and ecology. Carly’s research interests lie in the fields of ecology, conservation, soil science and botany. Her paper ‘Impact of nitrogen on the species richness of grasslands’ came out in Science in March 2004 amid a blaze of publicity, resulting in media coverage world-wide. The research showed, for the first time, that current levels of nitrogen deposition are having a negative impact on biodiversity in the UK. Since then Carly has completed a postdoctoral research project at Imperial College and is now working on diffuse pollution at Lancaster University.

Dr Debbie Wake

(read interview)

Deborah Bruce (Wake) is a published medical doctor, science researcher and trained media presenter. She is a keen advocate of science and health communication to a wider public audience and regularly partakes in topical media debate in her specialist area. She is an honours graduate of University of Edinburgh Medical School, member of the Royal College of Physicians, and has recently completed a PhD looking at the role of steroid hormones in obesity and diabetes. She specialises as a clinician, working in the field of diabetes, endocrinology and general medicine.

The Journalists

Anna Fazackerley

(read interview)

Anna Fazackerley has a degree in English from Manchester University, and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from Westminster University. Anna started out on science policy magazine, Research Fortnight, and then worked as a freelance journalist writing articles about science and education for The Guardian, the Scientist and the Financial Times before joining the Times Higher Education Supplement as a full-time science reporter in January 2004.

Tom Feilden

(read interview)

Tom Feilden is BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s science and environment correspondent, and is a former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Costing the Earth. Tom reports on science and the environment for Today, covering advances in genetics, space, technology, the GM debate and global warming. In November 2000 Tom won the Foreign Press Association award for the environment with his series on wildlife in Britain. In 2001, he won a British Environment and Media Award for his reports on climate change.

Mark Henderson

(read interview)

Mark Henderson is science editor of The Times. He graduated in modern history from Oxford University in 1996. After a brief spell working for the Sunday Express he joined The Times as a graduate trainee. He spent time as a general reporter, a leader writer, and covering health education and social affairs, before being appointed science correspondent in August 2000. As well as covering science for the news pages, he writes the Saturday Junk Medicine column, which aims to cast an evidence-based eye over the latest health stories.

Alok Jha

(read interview)

Alok Jha arrived at Imperial College in 1994 determined to become a particle physicist. A year of indescribably complex mathematics later, he shelved his plans to become the next Richard Feynman and began to concentrate instead on the music reviews for the college newspaper. Physics degree complete, he moved wholeheartedly into news reporting for Research Fortnight, a small science policy newsletter. In 2003 he joined The Guardian as a science correspondent, part of the launch team for Life, then the weekly science section. He now mainly writes news, features and comment on everything from botany to space physics for the daily science page in the new and improved Guardian, while contributing regularly to the other sections of the paper.

Fiona MacRae

(read interview)

Fiona MacRae is science reporter at the Daily Mail. She studied medical microbiology at Edinburgh University before training in journalism at Cardiff University. After spending three and a half years covering general news at the News & Star in Carlisle, she moved to London where she joined the Daily Mail. There, she continued to cover general news, while also gaining newsdesk experience. Since starting to cover science last summer, she has spearheaded the Mail’s coverage of bird flu. She also regularly covers health, the environment, food technology and social sciences.

The Press Officers

Dr Claire Bithell

(read top tips)

Dr Claire Bithell has a degree in cell biology and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Manchester. Her PhD focused on using different types of microscopy to study the movements inside frog eggs. She won the Daily Telegraph’s young science writer award in 2003, and this convinced her to leave bench science and begin a career in science communication. After getting some work experience with Cancer Research UK, Manchester Museum and writing for academic magazines, Claire began work at the Science Media Centre in 2004 as science information officer. She was promoted to senior press officer in December 2005.

Dr Jenny Gimpel

(read top tips)

Three years of wading through lakes collecting water samples while her hands turned blue failed to put Jenny off science. Although she migrated from a shiny white lab to an air-conditioned newsroom and then a university press office now working as the media relations manager at UCL, Jenny remains wedded to science and spends her days happily scanning papers on rubber hand experiments and mind reading devices. On weekends she freelances as a writer/editor and ponders the peculiarities of a country which has not caught on to the convenience of check-out till dividers enjoyed by rest of Europe.

and with top tips from Nicola Buckley & Genevieve Maul, Emma Darling and Ronnie Kerr

and an interview with Aeron Haworth who tells us exactly what a press officer does.

Last updated: October 05 2006

VoYS September 2004

VoYS NESTA Crucible

25th June 2005

Crucible is a year-long programme that offers 30 scientists (educated to PhD level and with at least three years of postdoctoral experience or the equivalent) the opportunity to attend a series of residential weekends called Labs. Each of three Labs is focused around a particular theme and consists of a combination of seminars, group discussions, skills sessions and more.

Sense About Science ran a half-day workshop at the ‘Science in the Headlines’ Lab. Due to time constraints this was a more condensed version of our usual young science days. Young scientists looked at the culture clash between science, where research takes years to be completed and the media where articles have to be written in hours. The session was aimed at demystifying the media process and working out practical solutions to some of the problems that young scientists face dealing with the media.

The panellists were: Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, representing the scientists; Anna Fazackerly, The Times Higher Education Supplement, and Vivienne Parry representing the journalists and Becky Morelle from the Science Media Centre.

For more information about the Crucible LAB programme please visit the NESTA website.

Last updated: January 17 2007

VoYS BA Festival

8th September 2005

In association with Science Next Wave September 2005 saw the Voice of Young Science programme crossing the Irish Sea to take part in the BA Festival of Science to discuss the question… is the distinction between commercial and non-commercial scientific research careers a real one? To an audience of young scientists the distinguished panel outlined their career paths, current roles and why they have chosen to work in their respective sectors and debated the following questions:

Are you ‘selling out’ when you opt for a career in industrial research over academia?
Do industry careers involve you in more advanced well-funded science?
Is one more amenable to pure or applied research?
Is one more likely to lead to applications that are of benefit to society?
Or are these distinctions false and misleading?

It was clear from the panel presentations that times have changed. As each panellist shared their careers, motivations and experience, the convergence in experience between industry and academic careers grew. Professor Nancy Rothwell stressed that there was no longer such a funding disparity between academic researchers and the commercial sector. Dr Ian Ragan spoke of the rigour of commercial science and Dr Nicola Gray of the effectiveness of cross-sector collaboration. Even the long hours’ culture is shared! Overall, the panel were unified: there is no such thing as two distinct and separate spheres, with one producing better science than the other. Yes there were some differences in working cultures but even these were being eroded.

Panel members

Professor Nancy Rothwell Vice President of Research, University of Manchester Professor Nancy Rothwell is Vice-President of Research at Manchester University. She currently holds a MRC Research Professorship and is a leading world expert in neuroscience focussing on stroke and brain injury. Nancy obtained a PhD and DSc in physiology from the University of London and her early research career was dedicated to investigating the mechanisms which underly obesity. Professor Rothwell was elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society in 2004 and is also the President of the British Neuroscience Association. Nancy is committed to public involvement in science and has a regular column in The Times Higher Education Supplement and makes frequent TV and radio appearances.
Dr Ian Ragan Director, CIR Consultancy Dr Ian Ragan is Director of CIR Consultancy Ltd which advises the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. He is currently Chair of the R&D Committee of the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries and his prior roles include Executive Director of Neuroscience Research and also European Scientific Affairs for Eli Lilly and Co. Ian completed his postdoctoral research in Biochemistry at Cornell University and the State University of New York in Albany before an academic career at the University of Southampton. He embarked upon his first industrial post in 1986 when he joined the Merck Sharp and Dohme Neuroscience Research Centre in Harlow, UK. He is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed publications to date and is very actively involved in the participation of the pharmaceutical industry in the European framework programmes of the European Commission.
Dr Nicola Gray Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice, University of Nottingham Nicola Gray is a lecturer in pharmacy practice at the University of Nottingham. Gray completed a PhD in Health Information Sources before receiving a a Harkness Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund, an opportunity she used to conduct a trans-Atlantic study on the use of Internet resources by adolescents for health and medicines information. A practicing community pharmacist, her other research and policy interests include health literacy, parents’ use of children’s medicines, direct-to-consumer advertising of medications, and improving access to medicines by extending prescribing rights. Gray was the 1999 recipient of the Pharmaceutical Care Award of the Pharmaceutical Journal and Glaxo Wellcome UK for excellence in the development of pharmaceutical services. She has also served as a member of numerous pharmaceutical societies, steering groups, and associations, including the Council of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.

Last updated: January 17 2007

VoYS September 2005

30th September 2005

Sessions:

Science in the media
Participants discussed the role and treatment of scientists in the public domain, following presentations by panellists, Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright, Researcher and educational outreach officer at the Cavendish Laboratory, Dr Milo Shaffer, Lecturer in Nanomaterials at Imperial College, London, and Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics and Public Engagement in Science at The University of Surrey

What journalists are looking for
A panel of journalists - Anna Fazackerley, Times Higher Education Supplement, Tom Feilden, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Alok Jha, The Guardian and Mark Henderson, The Times, explained how they approach stories and balance the need for news and entertainment with reporting science.

Taking a realistic approach to science reporting
How scientific news is communicated, typical difficulties, and areas of misunderstanding. The audience discussed practical problems in how scientific news is communicated, typical difficulties and areas of misunderstanding, led by Becky Morelle and Claire Bithell from the Science Media Centre.

Read reviews:
Don’t be afraid to speak out by Frances Downey
Voice of Young Science workshop by Lucy Moorcraft
Science in the Media by Anthony Smith
Chemists attend ‘Voice of Young Science’ workshop by Richard Van Noorden

Last updated: January 17 2007

VoYS past events

The first Voice of Young Science workshop was in 2004. Since then we have put on a number of successful communication workshops, as well as a series of other events that inform or directly involve our young scientists in the debates of the day.

VoYS workshop
18th May 2007
This VoYS event was held at the Insitute of Biology for biological sciences and engineering students

VoYS workshop
17th November 2006
This VoYS event was for physical sciences and engineering students

NESTA Crucible Lab weekend 2006
9th July 2006
This was the second time we ran our VoYS media workshop as part of the ‘Science in the headlines’ weekend.

VoYS workshop
23rd June 2006
This VoYS event was held at the Lancet and was for biomedical scientists.

VoYS workshop
30th September 2005
This VoYS event was for young scientists in the physical sciences.

BA Festival
8th September 2005
In association with Science Next Wave we crossed the sea to Dublin with our VoYS programme.

NESTA Crucible LAB weekend
25th June 2005
This was a half day event run at the ‘Science in the headlines’ weekend.

VoYS workshop
17th September 2004
Our first Voice of Young Science workshop was for young scientists in the biomedical sciences.

Last updated: June 26 2007

VoYS June 2006

Organised by Sense About Science, in association with Elsevier, the Medical Research Council and the Health Science Communication Trust

Voice of Young Science workshop (biomedical sciences)

23rd June 2006
Sense About Science’s fifth VoYS media workshop, this year held in the Lancet offices, showed once again that young research scientists have a real appetite to get involved in wider public debates about science once they know how. At the beginning of the workshop 91% of our attendees had felt that young scientists were, or might be, put off from participating in public debates about science, however, by the end of our workshop 71% of the attendees said they now felt able to get involved in media-led debates about science.

Sessions

Science in the media
This session introduced our young scientists to a panel of scientists who were well versed in the pitfalls of communicating with the media, but who have come out of their various experiences unscathed and who continue to work with the media. These included Dr Stephen Minger, Director of KCL’s Stem Cell Biology Laboratory Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases, Professor David McAlpine, Professor of Auditory Neuroscience and Director of the UCL Ear Institute, and Dr Azra Ghani, Reader in Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

What journalists are looking for
Next came the science correspondents, Mark Henderson, The Times, Alok Jha, The Guardian, Fiona MacRae, Daily Mail, and Tom Feilden, Radio 4’s Today programme, who put up a robust defence of their profession and who, by the end of the day, had won support and answered many of the concerns raised by our young scientists to do with misrepresentation of science by the media. The session helped the young scientists to understand how to negotiate the tensions between the media’s priorities of entertainment and fast deadlines and their own work early career researchers.
Talking about published and unpublished research
In the final session, the young scientists were given advice on how the peer review process works for different journals by Adrian Mulligan from Elsevier and practical tips on what to do if they are thrown into the media spotlight by Dr Claire Bithell from the SMC.

Read reviews:

VoYS media workshop by Selina Pearson, to be printed in the October edition of Physiology Today

War of the Worlds by Roni Wright, printed in the Glasgow University Guardian, the student newspaper for Glasgow University

Student Voice by Rivka Isaacson, printed in the Reporter, the newspaper of Imperial College London

Last updated: January 17 2007

VoYS workshops

Our media workshops are for post-grads, post docs, or equivalent in first job, who are passionate about science and want to communicate research to a wider audience.

They combine discussion about science-related controversies in media reporting with practical guidance to help younger scientists make a greater contribution to public debates.

Areas covered in the workshops include:

Science in the media

A discussion on the changing image and role of science and scientists in the public domain.
A series of case studies are presented and the scientists on the panel explain what has gone wrong and indicate lessons from their media experiences.

What journalists are looking for

A panel of journalists explain how they approach stories and balance the need for news and entertainment with reporting science.

Taking a realistic approach to science reporting.

How scientific news is communicated, typical difficulties, and areas of misunderstanding. Practical guidance on how to make your voice heard in debates about science.

The workshops have been immensely popular:

“An excellent workshop that has made a big difference to the way I view science in the media.”

“This workshop is needed by all science researchers in order to develop an informed attitude towards the media rather than the pessimistic attitude many scientists adopt.”

“Brilliant day. Good for young scientists to meet each other and communicate together.”

“Thoroughly eye-opening and enjoyable.”

You can read full reviews of previous workshops here.

Last updated: February 10 2010

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Last updated: July 16 2009

Office team

Tracey Brown, Managing Director

Tracey Brown is managing director of the UK-based charitable trust Sense About Science, which equips the public to make sense of science and evidence. She joined Sense About Science as director in its founding year 2002. Tracey has a background in social research, and previously spent four years working on a European Commission programme to establish social research and teaching in the former Soviet Union, and a year setting up a commercially based risk analysis centre. She is a trustee of Centre of the Cell and a trustee of the Responsible Nano Forum. In 2009 she became a commissioner for the UK Drugs Policy Commission. She sits on the Outreach Committee of the Royal College of Pathologists and in 2009 was made a Friend of the College. She is also chairman of DCA Hernhill Junior FC.

Sile Lane, Public Liaison

Sile joined Sense About Science in February 2009 after a career in stem cell research. As public liaison, Sile is concerned with the role of science and evidence in civic society. She also coordinates the Keep Libel Laws out of Science campaign.

Ellen Raphael, Director UK

Ellen is Director UK at Sense About Science. She studied sociology at the University of Kent and has a master’s degree in Social Research. She is responsible for the design and implementation of Sense About Science projects, working with scientists to produce materials for the public on contentious subjects including, chemicals, weather and radiation. As a non-scientist she enjoys grilling scientists to separate facts from fiction and is constantly surprised by what she discovers.

Leonor Sierra, Scientific Liaison

Leonor is Scientific Liaison at Sense About Science matching scientists with projects, problems and requests for help. After specialising in Physics during her undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, she stayed on at Cambridge University for her PhD, working on carbon nanotubes and zinc oxide nanowires - basically very very little wires. She joined Sense About Science in February 2008.

Alice Tuff, Development Manager

Alice is responsible for programme research and development at Sense About Science. Alice previously worked with Sense About Science as an intern in 2006, investigating clinics that were selling homeopathic antimalarials. She has a degree in cell biology and pathology from St Andrews University and spent six months travelling around Asia (thankfully her evidence-based antimalarial prophylactics worked!) prior to joining Sense About Science in May 2007.

Julia Wilson, Development Officer

Julia joined Sense About Science in 2008 as an intern after graduating with a degree in Biology from the University of Manchester. Since April 2009 she is Development Officer at Sense About Science and also coordinates the Voice of Young Science (VoYS) network.

Last updated: January 06 2010

Advisory Council

The Trustees and staff are supported by Advisory Council members, who volunteer their time and advice. The way in which Council members are involved in Sense About Science’s activities varies, reflecting the wide range of expertise within the Council and also reflecting current projects and the demands of responding to wider developments.

Professor John Adams
Professor of Geography, UCL

Mr Richard Ayre
Journalist

Professor Peter Atkins
Professor of Chemistry, University of Oxford

Professor Sir Colin Berry FMedSci
Emeritus Professor of Pathology, Queen Mary, London

Professor Colin Blakemore FMedSci FRS
University of Oxford

Professor Gustav Born FRS
Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology, King’s College London

Professor Sir Robert Boyd FMedSci
Director of NHS R&D for Greater Manchester

Professor John Coggins
Biochemical Society

Professor Phil Dale OBE
Emeritus Fellow of Plant Genetics, John Innes Research Centre

Professor Adrian Dixon FMedSci
Royal College of Radiologists

Dr Simon Festing
Understanding Animal Research

Dr Ron Fraser
Society for General Microbiology

Dr Irene Hames
Managing Editor of The Plant Journal, Wiley-Blackwell

Lord Hunt of Chesterton FRS
Professor of Climate Modelling, UCL

Lord Jenkin of Roding
Foundation for Science and Technology

Professor Trevor Jones CBE
Former Director-General of the ABPI

Professor Sir Peter Lachmann FRS FMedSci
Emeritus Professor of Immunology, University of Cambridge

Dr Stephen Ladyman MP
Member of Parliament (Lab) for South Thanet

Ms Prue Leith OBE
Food columnist and restaurateur

Dr Robin Lovell-Badge FRS
MRC National Institute for Medical Research

Professor Julian Ma
St George’s Hospital Medical School

Professor Alan Malcolm
Institute of Biology

Professor Vivian Moses
Visiting Professor of Biotechnology, King’s College London

Professor Sir Keith Peters FRS PMedSci
Emeritus Regius Professor of Physic, University of Cambridge

Lord Plumb of Coleshill DL
Former President of the National Farmers Union

Dr Ian Ragan
Neuroscientist and pharmaceutical/ biotechnology consultant

Dr Matt Ridley FMedSci
Author

Professor Raymond Tallis FMedSci
Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester

Professor Anthony Trewavas FRS
Professor of Plant Sciences, University of Edinburgh

Lord Turnberg of Cheadle FMedSci
Association of Medical Research Charities

Dr Roger Turner
Agricultural consultant

Professor Michael Wilson
Professor of Plant Biology, University of Warwick

Last updated: August 27 2009

Board of Trustees

Lord Taverne (Chair)

Dick Taverne studied philosophy and ancient history at Balliol College, Oxford. He became a lawyer (Queen’s Counsel), a Member of Parliament and served as a Minister from 1966 to 1970, first in the Home Office and then the Treasury, where he was Financial Secretary. In the early 1970s he launched the Institute for Fiscal Studies, now one of the most respected institutes in Britain. He has served on the boards of several international companies. In 1993 he founded a think tank, The Public Policy Centre, which later became a consultancy, Prima Europe, specialising in economic and political analysis. In 1996 he was appointed to the House of Lords. In recent years he has become interested in science and society and founded Sense About Science in 2002. He was elected President of the Research Defence Society in 2004. He was a member of the House of Lords Committee on the Use of Animals in Scientific Procedures and of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee. He is the author of The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy and the New Fundamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Professor Dame Bridget Ogilvie FMedSci FRS (Vice-Chair)

Bridget Ogilvie initially studied agriculture in Australia and then undertook research on the immune response to parasitic infections with the UK Medical Research Council before joining the staff of the Wellcome Trust, from which she retired as Director in 1998. She is now a Visiting Professor at UCL from where she is involved in a range of non-executive activities in the fields of science, education and their interaction with the public.

Professor Janet Bainbridge OBE

Janet Bainbridge is passionately interested in making science accessible and in 2000 was awarded the OBE for services to science. She sits on the OneNorthEast Science and Industry Council. She was Chair of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes until 2003. She is Chair of the GM Organisms (contained use) Advisory Committee and Chair of the British Potato Council Research Committee.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick

Michael Fitzpatrick has been a General Practitioner in Hackney, London for the past 15 years. He has written on a wide range of medical and political subjects for both medical publications and the mainstream media. He is Health Editor of the on-line magazine spiked and writes for the British Journal of Medical Practice. He is the author of The Tyranny of Health (Routledge 2001) and MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know (Routledge 2004).

Ms Diana Garnham

Diana Garnham is Chief Executive of the Science Council. She was previously Chief Executive of the Association of Medical Research Charities. She is involved in a wide range of other committees and advisory groups within higher education, health and science and the voluntary sector. She has written for both science and general publications on subjects as diverse as the national lottery, public debate and engagement in medical science and the management of intellectual property. Her academic background is in politics and international affairs.

Professor Paul Hardaker

Paul Hardaker is a mathematician by background whose PhD and early research work focused on radio propagation through the atmosphere. He worked at the Met Office for 14 years in a variety of roles including the Met Office’s Chief Advisor to Government, providing support to the Government in areas such as climate change policy, the civil contingency programme and the UK’s Public Met Service. He is currently Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society. He is also Chairman of the NERC directed programme on the Flood Risk from Extreme Events (FREE) and holds visiting professorships at both the University of Salford and the University of Reading. Paul is also a Non-Executive Director on the Board of Berkshire West Primary Care Trust and is actively involved with local and regional healthcare initiatives.

Professor Sir Brian Heap CBE FRS

Brian Heap, Vice-President of Academia Europaea, editor of Philosophical Transactions B of the Royal Society, was Master of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, Vice-President and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, Senior Visiting Scientist in the School of Clinical Medicine, Cambridge, Director of the Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics Research (Cambridge and Edinburgh) and Director of Science at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Swindon. Special Professor at the University of Nottingham, was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Expert Group on Cloning at the Department of Health, and works on developing country issues, particularly in China.

Professor Chris Leaver CBE FRS

Chris Leaver has a strong interest in the public understanding of science and has been actively involved in the current debate on genetically modified crops in the UK and Europe. In 2000, he was awarded the CBE for services to plant sciences. He is currently Sibthorpian Professor of Plant Science, Oxford University, Head of Department and a Fellow of St John’s College. He is a Trustee of the Natural History Museum and also the John Innes Foundation and serves on the Council of the John Innes Centre. He is Vice-Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Biochemical Society.

Dr Peter Marsh

Peter Marsh is a chartered psychologist, a Director of MCM Research Ltd and a Director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, a not-for-profit organisation which focuses on positive aspects of human behaviour and the communication of science and health issues. His research has included work on football fans, pub violence, non-verbal behaviour and the psychology of the motor car and driving.

Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve

Onora O’Neill has degrees from Oxford and Harvard, and has taught in the United States and at the University of Essex. She has been Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge since 1992. She writes on ethics and political philosophy, with particular interests in international justice, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and bioethics.

Dr Christie Peacock

Christie Peacock is a professional animal scientist and Chief Executive of the development agency FARM-Africa, which is involved in practical research and development projects in East and South Africa. On joining FARM-Africa, she ran a goat development project in Ethiopia, leading to the publication of Improving Goat Production in the Tropics. She is a member of the Wellcome Trust Advisory Committee on Animal Health in the Developing World and is a board member of the International Goat Association.

Mr Nick Ross

Nick Ross read psychology at Queen’s University Belfast and later became a Doctor of the University (honoris causa). He has been a leading broadcaster across a wide range of issues. He helped to change the climate of science reporting in the early 90s with an influential series of articles critical of media portrayal of science, and has been a member of the Committee on Public Understanding of Science and twice chairman of the Science Book Prize. He is a regular speaker at science meetings, is President of HealthWatch which campaigns for evidence-based medicine, is a supporter of the Campbell Collaboration, the international partnership to improve scientific methodology in the social sciences, and he founded the new discipline of Crime Science. He is an Honorary Fellow and visiting professor at UCL.

Dr Simon Singh

Simon Singh completed his PhD in particle physics at the University of Cambridge before joining the BBC science department in 1990. He was a producer and director on programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. Fermat’s Last Theorem, his documentary about the world’s most notorious mathematical problem, won a BAFTA in 1997, and he also wrote a book on the same which became the first mathematics book to become a No.1 bestseller in Britain. In 1999 Simon published The Code Book, a history of codes and code-breaking, and in 2004 he published Big Bang, a history of cosmology. His broadcasting includes a 5-part series on the history of cryptography for Channel 4 (The Science of Secrecy), two series of Mind Games on BBC4 and three series of Five Numbers for Radio 4. He has been a trustee of NESTA and the National Museum of Science and Industry, and he has a strong interest in science education in schools.

Members of the Board of Trustees sit as individuals, not as representatives of any other organisation.

Last updated: August 28 2009

About us

Sense About Science is an independent charitable trust promoting good science and evidence in public debates. We do this by promoting respect for evidence and by urging scientists to engage actively with a wide range of groups, particularly when debates are controversial or difficult.

We work with scientists to

respond to inaccuracies in public claims about science, medicine, and technology
promote the benefits of scientific research to the public
help those who need expert help contact scientists about issues of importance
brief non-specialists on scientific developments and practices

Sense About Science is governed by a Board of Trustees and run by a small office staff. We are supported by an Advisory Council and over 2,000 scientists and other specialists, ranging from Nobel Laureates to postdoctoral fellows, who are signed up to our database, Evidence Base. We also work with younger scientists in our VoYS (Voice of Young Science) programme, which you can read more about here.

Donate

If you would like to indicate your support for our aims, be involved in any aspect of our work or would like more information, then please fill in our online support form.

Last updated: April 16 2008

Get involved

Become a part of what we do

If you would like to indicate your support for our aims, be involved in any aspect of our work or would like more information, then please fill in our online support form.

If you are a scientist who wants to help put good science and evidence at the centre of public debates, then join Evidence Base, our database of specialists here.

Sense About Science does a lot on a shoestring and we depend on our supporters’ goodwill and generosity. You can support Sense About Science by making a donation.

A significant part of the work we do is responsive. Sense About Science is a small charity, operating with an office team of only four, so comprehensive monitoring is impossible. Therefore, we ask our supporters to act as our eyes and ears: if you see a bad story in the media or hear of something coming up that we should know about in advance, please do .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Data Protection:
Please note our compliance with The European Data Protection Directive as implemented in the Data Protection Act 1998. For further information please see our Privacy Policy.

    Last updated: April 16 2008

Voice of Young Science

The VoYS programme helps research scientists in the early stages of their career to get actively involved in public debates about science.

About VoYS
The Voice of Young Science network developed out of attendees at media workshops wanting to stay in touch. The network helps young researcher, scientists, medics and engineers in the early stages of their career to get actively involved in public debates about science, particularly on contentious subjects. Learn more here.

Activities
Learn about our latest activities here.

Workshops
Our media workshops are for post-grads, post docs, or equivalent in first job, who are passionate about science and want to communicate research to a wider audience. They combine discussion about science-related controversies in media reporting with practical guidance to help younger scientists make a greater contribution to public debates. (more...)

Publications
Voice of Young Science publications have achieved acclaim and generated press both in the UK and abroad. View a list of VoYS publications here.

Interesting Articles
Read here.

VoYS partners include:

    Last updated: February 10 2010

Donate

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    Last updated: July 16 2009

Reporting the Truth on Lie Detectors

Simon Singh Appeal Hearing

Interesting Articles

Shoot down science at your own risk, Alan Dangour - January 2010

See a video about VoYS and how it got started, 2008

Celebrities and Science 2009

Media coverage

100 reasons why global warming is natural, The Daily Express, 15th December 2009

Systematic Reviews

Comments:

Comment on the sacking of Professor David Nutt

Voice of Young Science

Presentation

Complaint about Simon Singh and the Keep Libel Laws out of Science campaign

Sir John Maddox 1925 - 2009

Dick Taverne

Thank you for your support

Sign up to help Keep the Libel Laws out of Science

***UPDATE 10 December 2009***The Campaign is gaining momentum and we have now joined with EnglishPEN and Index on Censorship in the Coalition for Libel Reform. Add your voice and sign the petition to urge politicians to support a bill for major reform of the libel laws now, at www.libelreform.org.

OFT LAUNCHES FAKE WEBSITES TO WARN OF BOGUS WEIGHT LOSS AND ‘MIRACLE’ HEALTH CURE’

Coverage so far includes:

presentation

Standing up for Science 2 - the nuts and bolts

The Launch

The background

Acknowledgements

The Detox Dossier

Celebrities and Science Review 2008

See below for some of the media coverage

News archive

February 2009

January 2009

December 2008

November 2008

October 2008

September 2008

August 2008

July 2008

June 2008

May 2008

April 2008

March 2008

February 2008

January 2008

2007

Under Construction

Standing up for Science workshop for physical sciences and engineering

October 2007

Sessions:

Threat to good science in policy making

UPDATE

Sodium benzoate

Wi-Fi networks

May 2007 Speaker Biographies

Voice of Young Science Workshop - About the speakers

VoYS May 2007

Voice of Young Science workshop (biological sciences and bioengineering)

Privacy Policy

Portraying science to the wider public

Nicole Kane is an MRC-funded postdoc at the Centre for Reproductive Biology, Edinburgh

Science in the media: damage control or public engagement?

Gemma Phillips is a PhD student at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Dear Scientist, what is the price of milk?

Betina Ip is a PhD student at Oxford University Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics.

VoYS NESTA Crucible 2006

9th July 2006

VoYS November 2006

Voice of Young Science workshop (physical sciences and engineering)

Interview with Dr Carly Stevens

You first started dealing with the media during your PhD. Is that right?

You submitted that to Science?

So after that initial press conference you started to get a lot of media enquiries?

Since then have you done any more media stuff?

You said you got the odd call. Is that to comment on other people’s research?

Would you say that your media experience was good? Did you have any bad stories?

Thinking about yourself back then and the experience you gained in your dealings with the media, what do you wish you had known before you started?

Interview with Dr Milo Shaffer

How did you first come into contact with the media? Did you have any experience when you were a PhD student?

So how did that happen?

So was that before or after you were listed as one of the experts on the Imperial website?

UPDATE 10 December 2009The Campaign is gaining momentum and we have now joined with EnglishPEN and Index on Censorship in the Coalition for Libel Reform. Add your voice and sign the petition to urge politicians to support a bill for major reform of the libel laws now, at www.libelreform.org.