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Talking about published and unpublished research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
