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
