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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?

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
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