Last Thursday morning, a news story on Radio 1 temporarily distracted me from my Coco Pops.

It’s not often you hear reporting of London-based tissue transplant breakthroughs, on a radio show which usually operates on the level of fart jokes and song parodies, but there it was. Now whilst I was very pleasantly surprised that this kind of story was getting airtime on a show with over 7.5 million listeners, it made me wonder why it was chosen.

This is not something I have an answer to, and as a science communication student, maybe I should. We had lectures on just what makes a story become ‘news’, whether it is especially novel, has reference to ‘celebrity’ or was just featured due to a lack of other, actual, news. But I just couldn’t work out what boxes this story ticked, and how or why it made it on to Radio 1.

It’s not the first time the possibility of womb transplants have been covered in the BBC news (there were previous stories in 2002 and 2007), and I’m not aware that Thursday 22nd was a particularly dull day for news (there was a bomb in Belfast, and much debate over the impending BNP appearance on Question Time). And although the Hammersmith-based scientist in question (Dr Richard Smith) may be much admired in the scientific community, I’m not convinced he ticks the celebrity box either.

So after a year of studying, I’m afraid I still don’t know the answer. How do some science stories break into the mainstream news whilst other (possibly more significant) breakthroughs are glossed over or ignored all together? Whilst many debates over science in the news focus on whether it has been sensationalised, maybe we need to look at the bigger picture and ask exactly what it is that satisfies the news editors, and how we can use this knowledge to get more science (and not just health) on Radio 1.